Supply Chain Advisory
Research · Practice · Publication
Supply Chain Research & Advisory
Poisson Consulting brings quantitative research discipline to the complex, high-stakes supply chain programs where conventional wisdom falls short. Practitioners who publish. Researchers who deliver.
West Friendship, MD · poissonconsulting.com
Named for the Poisson process — the mathematics of uncertainty, arrival rates, and the stochastic behavior of real supply chains.
Every engagement begins as a research question before it becomes a deliverable. Frameworks are hypotheses until tested against your data, your network, your constraints.
Our working papers on SSRN — covering digital measurement, organizational entropy, and natural capital accounting — are part of the same intellectual practice as our client work. Knowledge compounds when it's shared.
Poisson Consulting is an exclusively referral-based practice. Engagements are taken selectively, with a small number of active clients at any given time. That's not a limitation — it's a quality signal.
Research
Poisson Consulting publishes applied economic and organizational research on SSRN. Our current working papers examine measurement failures at the intersection of digital economics, organizational theory, and environmental accounting.
Digital Economics · National Accounting · AI
Digital Dark Matter: The Measurement Crisis of Deflationary Wealth
The Solow Paradox is not a failure of technology — it's a failure of the instrument. This paper demonstrates that the System of National Accounts falls into a "Zero-Price Trap" in the digital economy, where technological efficiency drives marginal prices toward zero, causing recorded GDP to contract even as aggregate utility expands. With the rapid scaling of AI, this measurement gap is widening at an unprecedented rate. We construct the Equivalent Service Model and propose a Digital Solvency Ratio to correct the denominator error in sovereign debt analysis.
Organizational Theory · Information Economics · AI & the Firm
The Entropic Firm: Bureaucracy as a Thermodynamic Necessity
Standard theory attributes the Coasean Ceiling to agency costs. We argue it is a structural necessity derived from information entropy. Modeling the firm as Maxwell's Demon, we show that management is isomorphic to information erasure — an irreducible energy cost per bit of ambiguity resolved. We introduce the Thermodynamic Solvency Ratio and analyze Generative AI as a potential topological escape from this limit, subject to a binding fidelity constraint.
Environmental Economics · Natural Capital · SEEA
The Consequentiality-Weighted Wealth Protocol: Resolving the Reliability Crisis in Natural Capital Valuation
The transition from flow-based GDP to stock-based Inclusive Wealth stalls on a reliability crisis in non-market valuation. We propose the Consequentiality-Weighted Wealth (CWW) Protocol, integrating a Stock-Flow Separation Principle with a rigorous Consequentiality Filter. Validated against Costa Rica's PES program, Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund, and U.S. Manufacturing defensive expenditures, the protocol reveals an $829B shadow liability absent from standard industrial accounts.
Supply Chain Governance · Mechanism Design · Compliance Economics
The Trust Tax: From Ceremonial Verification to Physical Anchoring in Deep-Tier Supply Chains
Global supply chain compliance is experiencing a materiality crisis: the administrative layer of trade — the "Map" — has decoupled from physical reality, the "Territory." Drawing on game theory, information economics, and the 2025 UFLPA enforcement record (77% shipment denial rate), this paper defines the Trust Tax as the aggregate deadweight loss of ceremonial verification that fails to alter the underlying incentive for fraud. We propose the Automated Trust Stack — integrating physical anchoring (isotopic triangulation, PUFs, synthetic DNA), performance-locked smart contract escrow, and decentralized integrity staking pools — as a Shared Destiny Architecture that makes supplier stewardship the economically dominant strategy.
Econophysics · Non-Linear Dynamics · Operational Solvency
Cavitation-Induced Hysteresis in Economic Networks: A Hydrodynamic Phase Transition Model of Operational Solvency
Standard models of supply chain dynamics treat the Bullwhip Effect as harmonic oscillation in elastic media — assuming capacity is continuous and perturbations reversible. This paper argues that linear approximation holds only within laminar flow regimes and fails to account for topological phase transitions under high-amplitude volatility. Using a hydrodynamic isomorphism, we model the firm as a fluid conduit subject to thermodynamic constraints, deriving a critical threshold where local liquidity drops below fixed solvency requirements. Below this threshold, the node undergoes a discrete phase transition from operational to insolvent state, introducing structural hysteresis and rendering the system non-ergodic over the recovery horizon. We introduce the Net Positive Solvency Head (NPSH) metric and validate empirically against 2021 semiconductor supply data.
Industry Publications
SAPTips Journal
Monitoring the SAP WM Warehouse: The Warehouse Activity and RF Monitors
December 2006
SCM Expert · Vol. 5 No. 3
How One Company Manages Its Hub and Satellite Supply Chain
2007
SCM Expert · Vol. 5 No. 3
Warehouse Management Data Elements
2007
SAPTips Journal · Vol. V Issue 1
Cycle Counting: Contrasting SAP's Inventory and Warehouse Management Modules
February / March 2007
SAPTips Journal · Vol. V Issue 3
Kanban? In SAP You Can
June / July 2007
SAPTips Journal · Vol. V Issue 6
Case Study: SAP XSI Express Delivery Interface
December / January 2007–08
SCM Expert · Vol. 6 No. 3
Improve Supply Chain Efficiency with Vendor-Managed Inventory
2008
SCM Expert · Vol. 8 Update 6
How a Mill Products Company Tracks Handling Units Across Modules in SAP ECC 6.0
2010
Services
Complex, high-stakes engagements across the full supply chain lifecycle. We work where the problem is hardest and the margin for error is smallest.
Select Engagements
Since 1998, Poisson Consulting and its principals have delivered supply chain strategy, program management, and systems implementation for organizations across consumer goods, retail, aerospace, metals, energy, telecom, and insurance.
American Greetings
Consumer Packaged Goods
Applied Extrusion Technologies
Metals & Mill Products
Boeing
Aerospace
Bombardier Transportation
Heavy Manufacturing
Central Garden and Pet
Consumer Packaged Goods
Compaq / HP
High Tech
Crocs
Retail, Fashion & Footwear
Lululemon
Retail
Mountain West Farm Bureau
Insurance
Nord Trampoline
Sporting Goods
Nortel
Telecom
Novelis
Metals & Mill Products
Pennzoil
Consumer Packaged Goods
Performance Health
Medical / Retail
Prince Energy
Energy, Oil & Gas
Steel Technologies
Metals & Mill Products
Triumph Group
Aerospace
W.R. Grace
Chemicals
Walmart
Retail
Principal
Education
Prior Firms
Bruce Rishel is the founder and principal of Poisson Consulting, LLC. He has advised global organizations on supply chain strategy and transformation since 1998, with a practice spanning consumer goods, retail, fashion, aerospace and defense, high-tech, telecommunications, medical, metals and milled products, and energy.
His consulting career began at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he worked on large-scale ERP implementations and supply chain redesign. He subsequently led the supply chain practice at Perot Systems (later acquired by Dell), before founding Poisson Consulting in 2016. He has directed programs ranging from enterprise SAP rollouts and greenfield distribution automation to full PMO buildouts and S&OP transformations at nine-figure scale.
Rishel is an active researcher and author. His working papers on SSRN — addressing digital measurement failure, organizational thermodynamics, and natural capital accounting — reflect a sustained effort to apply rigorous economic and systems thinking to problems that practitioners encounter but rarely formalize. A frequent speaker at industry conferences including SAP SAPPHIRE, he co-developed the Warehouse, Inventory and Logistics (WIL) certificate for ASCM and the NRF Foundation's RISE Up program.
Poisson Consulting is an exclusively referral-based practice. Engagements are taken selectively, and every client relationship receives direct involvement from scoping through delivery.
Contact
Poisson Consulting is an exclusively referral-based practice. If you've found your way here through one, or you're a prospective subcontractor or collaborator, we'd like to hear from you.