Dr. Chockalingam

Demand Planning & Financial Forecasting After Covid-19 Pandemic The Great Pandemic created the great disruption although not a dislocation yet – all of us are huddled inside our homes for the most part except for those noble souls namely Front line workers and Essential workers. The great disruption is magnifying the importance of risk identification and mitigation across the [...]

Even after month 3 of the pandemic, we were still out of stock on Hand Sanitizers, Face Masks and Gloves because of supply shortages.   This has engaged the American manufacturing machine into high gear. With many Fortune 100 companies manufacturing masks, Gloves, and Ventilators, we may see the classic bull-whip effect on the supply chain.  Out of stock for [...]

All Models are wrong while some are useful. The most useful models are the ones that work with limited and imperfect data and at a time of crisis when unbiased points of view are needed. Particularly when there is misinformation and sensationalism every where. The Covid-19 pandemic is unlike anything we have seen before in our lifetime. Previously we [...]

As I have written before, we were able to estimate Covid19 peak occurrence by country and by state for some US States based on available data that are being archived by Johns Hopkins. Some of the countries have already past their peak. As can be seen in the table above, South Korea and Italy have just peaked and early [...]

Covid-19 Epidemic The World has entered an unusual period in modern times – a large scale epidemic that is spreading like wildfire across the globe and leaving economies in shambles along with lost lives in a short period of time. Covid-19 imported from China into Europe and the Americas has already shut down many aspects of modern life – [...]

Demand Bull-whip With the advent of the Corona Virus in the USA, there is pandemonium in the economy besides the pandemic that is creating a lot of turbulence. The US Consumers are raiding the retail stores in a panic and buying anything they can. This shortage is demand induced – spike due to hoarding needs. Consumers are essentially moving [...]

Is this an Arabian trick? Saudi Arabia has now set a unilateral price and decided to pump enough oil to flood the world. This was not the case in the past. The oil kingdom has always acted as a clearing house for global oil. They changed their output according to global supply to balance out what is needed. This [...]

Make Australia dirty again?! Toilet tissues are out of stock in Australia. Woolworth’s is rationing toilet tissues in that country. We are not far behind. Most online stores and bricks were out of toilet paper in the US. In a couple of months we may be rationing many products if China is not back online and shipping critical items [...]

Russians and the Saudis could not agree on output cuts for the oil markets so they decided to kill the US oil exploration companies. Oil dropped 30% over the weekend to $31 a barrel. Projections are it could hit $20 a barrel – adjusted for inflation it could be even free. The market is set to drop another 1000 [...]