What a Backward Leap in 1968 Teaches Us About Supply Chain Evolution
Picture this:
October 1968, Mexico City.
The Olympic stadium hums with tension.
Dick Fosbury, a lanky American athlete, sprints toward the high jump bar and leaps, not facing it like everyone else, but turning his back to it. He arches over headfirst, landing softly on foam mats. Gold medal. Olympic record at 2.24 meters. The crowd gasps. Coaches scratch their heads.
The Fosbury Flop is born - a total rethink of how to conquer height.
That same month in 1968, half a world away, in a humming factory of Black & Decker, another quiet revolution unfolds. Joseph Orlicky, an IBM engineer, flips the script on inventory management. No more guesswork or frantic reorders. Instead, he "explodes" demand through bills of materials, timing material requirements precisely using computers. Black & Decker, first to fully implement Material Requirements Planning (MRP), goes live with Orlicky’s time-phased material planning, exploding bills of material, and aligning component and purchase orders to a master schedule. It’s a giant leap beyond reorder-point and EOQ-based methods.
Two leaps in one month. One defies gravity. The other harnesses computation to orchestrate a synchronization of supply with demand schedules. Both shatter old ways, sparking eras of dominance.
Flash back to the early days. High jumpers in the 1800s? Pure improvisation with front-on hops from a standstill, barely clearing 1.8 meters. No technique, just grit. Supply chains of the time mirrored that improv: managers eyeballed shelves, ordering on hunches.
Then came structure. In 1895, The Scissors became the standard high jump technique. At the 1896 Athens Olympics (first modern Games), the winning jump (Ellery Clark, USA) was done with a scissors-style approach. In the classic scissors, the jumper stays upright, lifts the lead leg over the bar like a hurdle, then the trail leg follows in a scissor motion.
The Western Roll bursts onto the scene. The jumper goes over the bar side-on, leading with the inside leg, body rolled sideways, face down. It’s efficient and pushes records past 2.07 meters by the 1930s. It becomes the go-to, a best practice etched in Olympic gold. Inventory followed suit: Reorder Point systems emerged. Set a minimum stock level, reorder when you hit it. Simple, repeatable, stable. It removed guesswork. No more daily panic. No more eyeballing. Performance climbed, but limits soon appeared. In volatile conditions, reorder points meant one of two outcomes: stockouts or bloated inventory.
Each was the best practice of its era - until the game changed again.
Enter The Straddle in 1937: a belly-down style where the jumper leads with one leg, the torso and hips rotate and then the jumper swings the trail leg over in a scissoring, straddling motion across the bar. Records climb to 2.28 meters by the 1960s. Refinements add inches, but new heights plateau into evolutionary, not revolutionary. On the factory floor, Toyota's Taiichi Ohno pioneers the Kanban technique in the 1940s and '50s, using visual cards to pull materials only when needed. They limit work-in-progress. Expose waste. It's a flow mindset, echoing the Straddle's smoother mechanics. Gains are real, but both are techniques that demand extreme stability to shine.
Then, bam, it’s 1968. Fosbury’s Flop exploits new foam pits, decoupling the jumper from old fears of injury. Biomechanics win: the center of mass stays lower, energy redirects upward. Skeptics call it crazy. Within years, the adopters soar. Yury Tarmak clears 2.25 meters in 1972; Gerd Wessig smashes 2.36 in 1980. The Flop becomes universal.
MRP? Orlicky’s brainchild does something just as radical for factories. Instead of isolated reorder points, it synchronizes every demand through a dependent bill of materials. Finished-goods forecasts explode into precise orders and timing for every part and subassembly. Black & Decker proves it scales. By the 1970s, Orlicky’s book spreads the gospel; MRP II adds capacity checks in the 1980s. Factories leap ahead. But volatility bites: forecast errors cascade, plans jitter, MRP nervousness rules.
Fosbury wasn’t the highest jumper forever. Others refined his Flop and eclipsed his mark. Orlicky’s MRP powered giants, but globalization and volatility exposed cracks. Enter hybrids: Sales & Operations Planning in the 1990s to sync teams; Vendor-Managed Inventory to smooth replenishment. Like athletes perfecting their run-ups, these tweaks kept MRP viable in a changing world.
Fast forward to 2011. Demand Driven MRP (DDMRP) lands like the next generation Fosbury Flop. Chad Smith and Carol Ptak blend MRP’s structure with strategic buffers and true decoupling points that absorb variability. Material flow pulls from real demand, not brittle forecasts. Strategic buffers stifle the bullwhip. In a world of growing external uncertainty, there’s internal resilience, like modern jumpers sailing past 2.43 meters with a data-driven, biomechanical precision.
The lesson? Innovation isn’t static. It’s a leap into the unknown, flipping conventions to clear new heights. Fosbury turned his back on tradition. Orlicky taught us to plan backward from the end. Today, in supply chains battered by chaos, DDMRP whispers: Decouple. Buffer. Thrive. Because the bar keeps rising and the boldest leaps win the gold.