Supply Chain View

A lengthy post today that’s been in the pipeline for a while. The Lean Enterprise Institute have published an English translation of The Birth of Lean, recounting the experiences of the early Toyota practitioners, and how their experiences shaped what became Lean methods and thinking. The introduction and first chapter are available as a free [...]

It’s a classic technique: follow an order from receipt to fulfilment. Shapiro, Rangan and Sviokla wrote an influential article on the subject in HBR in 1992 (Staple yourself to an order). Now, with more humour, a YouTube version. An outfit called Business Process Excellence in the US have posted an 8 minute animation on the [...]

Sometimes people tell me that 5S only applies in factories, and if they’ve been exposed to the “inactive banana” school of dim-witted implementation I can’t blame them. But here’s a cautionary tale that might persuade you that the principles – intelligently applied – are sound. Supply Chain View has been “off air” for a while [...]

It has been a long time since I updated the site, almost a year in fact. Although my last employer didn’t explicitly forbid my sharing my professional thoughts on line, they did make it clear they were uncomfortable with it and I decided to respect their wishes. But now that I have moved on, I [...]

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won. The customers’ confusion stems from the concept [...]

Sometimes people get hung up on semantics. Sometimes it pays to be clear – very clear. I am currently trying to wade through some waters muddied by misunderstanding and poor use of terminology. My employer has had some good quality experience of Lean (albeit in a fairly small section of its operations) for about four [...]

There was a pretty depressing story in the Guardian a few days ago that proposes, in typical newspaper hyperbole, that Britain is in the grip of a numeracy crisis. For once, the concern is justified. According to the article, there are 3 times as many UK adults with poor numeracy than poor literacy. That’s 15.1 [...]

Sometimes I find something on the web that I need to share right away. This is one of those times. MIT OpenCourseWare is a great project to provide an “open educational resource” for educators and students across the world by publishing course material from MIT on the web. I’d like to point you in the [...]

We’re so accustomed to “doom-and-gloom” stories about manufacturing, it came as a very pleasant surprise to hear some happy news on the radio this morning. Confidence in manufacturing output and orders is at a ten-year high, according to the EEF. This is at a time when interest rates are rising, there are fears of a [...]

This is the second part of a two-part post. Part 1 was posted last week. 6. Optimise stock over the range The same investment in stock can produce better or worse levels of availability. This is intuitively obvious if we think of some reductio ad absurdum examples: all of our stock invested in a single [...]