Dock appointment smoothing

A supply chain idea becomes valuable when it changes a decision at the right moment. This brief explores dock appointment smoothing as a way to connect signals with a planner’s next action.

Practitioner lens

Evaluate dock appointment smoothing against a balanced scorecard: customer service, total cost, working capital and planner effort. Improvement in one measure can shift burden to another.

First experiment

Define a human review rule for low-confidence cases and keep an auditable reason for each override.

This is an original educational brief. It is a starting point for discussion, not a claim that one technique fits every supply chain.