Supply Chain View

This was prompted by a question on the CILT’s eDiscussion forum. I thought the topic deserved a little more room for explanation, so here are my top ten tactics for simultaneous inventory reduction and service improvement. I have divided this into two posts – five tactics today, the next five coming up in part 2. [...]

I have had a couple of conversations recently that have led me to think about how much overstock we might expect in a Pull supply chain even under fairly idealistic conditions. The first was with a colleague working on a redesign of a warehouse in which a large number of products had stock outside of [...]

The Lean approach is so well established in manufacturing that it’s easy to forget how novel its ideas are in the service sector. So novel are they, and so popular, that in the U.S. there is currently a powerful brain drain of Lean practitioners away from manufacturing and into services, according to a recent article [...]

On the Scottish Executive website I have just come across a useful report examining the implementation of Lean in the public sector. Politicians of all colours would love the administration of public services to be more efficient. Cost reductions can pay for pet projects, enhanced services or tax cuts. In the UK, the public has [...]

A couple of weeks ago I was writing about the cultural aspects of Lean. Then a glut of work hit me and a lot of stuff had to give: work-life balance, Supply Chain View, … This happens occasionally due to the demands of consulting project work, but it has made me sensitive of late to [...]

I mentioned in a recent post that I’m still coming across a lot of confusion about the role of the customer in Lean. So it was good to hear Sir Alan Jones, Chairman Emeritus of Toyota UK, making a really clear statement about this on BBC Radio 4′s The Bottom Line on Saturday (2nd June [...]

Since posting a couple of days ago about the announcement of job cuts at Dell, I have noticed that this has already become a hot topic on the Lean blogs. Kevin Meyer at Evolving Excellence suggests that Dell’s cost cutting is motivated by the desire to manipulate the stock price. Where others have suggested that [...]

At a seminar I ran earlier this week for CILT, this is a paraphrasing of what one of the delegates said to me: “Lean is all about cost reduction. It focuses on the internal processes of the company. It does not think about the customer.” It is now over 60 years since Toyoda Kiichiro, then [...]

It’s just been announced that Toyota has overtaken GM as the world’s largest carmaker. Does this mark the triumph of Lean? Almost. It’s worth noting that GM has recruited key staff trained at Toyota, and that it’s operating process (“GMS” – Global Manufacturing System) is built on from elements of Lean – see this article [...]

This has been on the web for some time but I’ve only just come across it. Gemba Panta Rei is a Lean weblog that consultants Gemba have been posting since 2003. Gemba’s press are about to publish a translation of Taiichi Ohno’s Gemba Keiei, or Workplace Management. This is one of the three books he [...]