OK, so what are the key points from this lesson?

There's a couple.
First, the whole idea of Push versus Pull Systems, where push
is where I'm being proactive, and I'm making my decisions
based on a forecasted demand.
I'm doing it on a forecast, on a best estimate.
A pull is reactive, and it's based on the actual demand.
Think of the sandwich shop.
Push, I'm putting premade sandwiches out,
based on my forecast, or my estimate of what
demand will be.
Pull, I'm making them as the orders come in.
There are benefits to having these mixed systems.
And where a system changes from a push to a pull,
then that's called the push-pull point,
or the push-pull boundary.
The idea here is you want to maximize
that external variety-- the customized type of products
I have-- and minimize the internal variety.
And one way to do that is this wrap concept.
Keep things raw as possible, modularity, and postponement.
Because this has an added benefit--
is that if I have sub-assemblies or components,
I can aggregate demand.
If they go into multiple end items and it
makes it easier to forecast.
We'll spend a lot more on that in forecasting
in the next several lectures.
But the idea is that virtually all supply chains
are combination, both push and pull.
And so you want to utilize this and use
the idea of postponement to improve operations.
Then we talk about segmentation strategies.
Because if I have different supply chains in my company,
I want to determine how different products should flow
through those different supply chains.
So the idea of segmentation is, I find different ways
to divide the products, the customers,
and treat them differently.
You always segment with a purpose in mind.
We talked about functional versus innovative products.
It's a classic example of segmenting
two types of products.
Product segmentation is typically
done with an ABC type analysis, somehow the demand,
the velocity is included in that.
Higher value items are the As.
Faster velocity typically are As.
The slower, lower value things are Cs.
It's a good starting point, but different companies
add different flavors to this.
Some look at variability.
Some look at profitability.
There's all these different ways you can do this,
but they all kind of sit on top of the standard ABC analysis.
Then we quickly went over two types of distribution
that we'll be focusing on a lot in this course,
the Normal Distribution and the Poisson Distribution.
So hopefully you got a lot out of this lesson,
and if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions,
don't be confused.
Use the discussion board.