All posts by Deanna Wenstrup

Deanna has 28 years of experience in production scheduling and planning, linear program and expert systems design, development, implementation, and interfacing to external databases.

Tardigrades can survive anything…. Can your Supply Chain?

Deanna WenstrupApril 24, 2018

Article[Business Process, Network Design, Optimization, Sales and Operations Planning, Supply Chain Agility, Supply Chain Improvement, Supply Chain Optimization, Supply Chain Planning, Sustainability, Sustainable Supply Chain]

Tardigrades, which are often called water bears, are nearly microscopic. Although they are usually water dwelling creatures, they can be found in Antarctic ice, ocean depths of 14,000 feet and in the Himalayas at a height of 20,000 ft. They can survive just about anywhere, including outer space. Fossils of tardigrades have been found in …
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Database Sharding and Partitioning

Deanna WenstrupJanuary 9, 2018

Article[Optimization Software, Supply Chain Optimization]

Last weekend I met up with some DBA friends for lunch. Try as you might, the conversation always seems to return to talking shop and soon we were discussing the differences between data partitioning and sharding. There seems to always be a lot of conflicting opinions on this topic, so I felt it was worthy …
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Supply Chain Challenges during the Retail Recession

Deanna WenstrupDecember 8, 2017

Article[Network Design, supply chain network design, Supply Chain Optimization, Supply Chain Planning]

Last summer we were having dinner with some friends. One of the people at the table worked for DineEquity, the parent company of Applebee’s. He proceeded to tell us about the current initiative to redo the cooking equipment in all Applebee restaurants with wood-fired grills. They were going to introduce wood fired steak, chicken, pork …
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Boots on the Ground

Deanna WenstrupMay 8, 2017

Article[Aspen SCM, Assessment, MIMI, Scheduling]

At Profit Point, our consulting team has over a century of combined experience implementing Aspen Supply Chain Management (MIMI) solutions. Although the concepts for developing a model are similar from plant to plant, there is nothing quite like getting boots on the ground to truly understand the client needs. With that philosophy in mind, a …
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Freeze Dried Fuzzy Logic

Deanna WenstrupOctober 27, 2016

Article[Fuzzy logic, Optimization]

My hobby is backpacking. When you backpack you carry everything on your back, so you quickly become obsessed with how much everything weighs. One of the biggest challenges I typically face is meal planning – food is heavy, bulky and often perishable. As a result of this challenge, backpackers typically carry freeze dried food. …
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Lessons from the Economic Crisis in Venezuela

Deanna WenstrupJuly 14, 2016

Article[Global Supply Chain, Optimization, Supply Chain Planning, Sustainability]

Several years ago I started collecting coins. I love the beauty of a nicely preserved coin; just looking at the year on the coin takes me back to that time and place in history. In addition to the usual proof sets most numismatists collect, I also like to collect coins that reflect unique times in …
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