I haven’t thought much about pizza delivery in the last 10 years.  However, it seems like a lot of people do.  And, efficient pizza delivery makes people happy.

So, maybe we should use pizza deliver to explain supply chain concepts to people who may not have thought much about the supply chain.  When we wrote the book, pizza delivery helped explain some concepts.  Within the last 48, I’ve seen two other examples with pizza delivery.

Here are my top 3 reasons why you should use pizza delivery to explain the supply chain:

1. Our book has a good example that uses pizza delivery to define different uses of the term service level.  Service level can mean the time to get a pizza to someone’s house or the percent of time you have the ingredients your customers ask for.  You need good network design to locate your restaurants and good inventory control and forecasting to make sure you have what your customers will order.
2. Yesterday’s blog post brought up the fact that you better have good processes in place to quickly get the order, make the pizza, and deliver it.  Specifically, yesterday’s post highlighted that you better be able to take orders from the phone, the web, and from mobile apps.  A good discussion on having the right IT strategy.
3. The book, The Human Face of Big Data, used pizza delivery in Manhattan to show movement.  The picture at the top of the post shows the path’s of the Domino’s pizza delivery bikers on a Friday night.  From the picture, the very bright spots show the locations of the restaurants and you can see the areas with the most demand.  This highlights how a supply chain must deliver to its customers.  The article points out that these restaurants receive product from a warehouse in Connecticut (so, there is an infrastructure behind the local infrastructure).  Someone had to decide on this warehouse in Connecticut and how many cities it would serve.

With these three examples, you can explain a lot about supply chain strategy with a business that people can relate to.