Lean Supply Chain

Using Network Optimization Technology To Enable Your Lean Supply Chain

From a lean and agile supply chain perspective, an optimally designed supply chain can significantly improve margins, support expansion into new markets, enhance the customer experience, and reduce operating costs. Optimizing your supply chain network helps achieve more value and less waste through keeping lower inventories, maintaining the right stock levels, and choosing the right […]

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How Supply Chain Strategies Impact
E-commerce Success

E-commerce has emerged as part of a company’s omni-channel marketing program. Achieving success requires not only an agile, lean supply chain, but also a strategy to get there. Many e-commerce companies sell a variety of products, and each type of product establishes different strategic needs. For example, functional products require lean and flexible network strategies, […]

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Lean: It’s Not About Pens and Pencils Anymore

Traditionally, Lean has been considered a "pen and pencil" technique. But today it is a key enabler of an efficient supply chain that links lean thinking with available and affordable systems and technologies to get the most out of improved processes. This "traditional" view is understandable. In the past, Lean was more often than not […]

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Does Your Supply Chain Need an Alignment?

If your supply chain isn’t aligned with your overall competitive strategy, then performance may fall short of expectations, with higher costs, poor execution, and reduced revenue and profits. When a company develops a strategic growth plan, it has to decide which priorities—cost, quality, time or flexibility—to focus on. It must then manage the supply chain […]

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Changing the Shape of Supply and Demand

Demand sensing and demand shaping have become important strategies when considering customer collaboration and downstream visibility to improve supply chain efficiency. Demand sensing refers to forecasting methods that use mathematical techniques and real-time information to create more accurate demand forecasts (a variety of supply chain analytics), while demand shaping is the act of influencing demand […]

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Saving Green While Going Green

While good for the environment, supply chain sustainability can also be good for the bottom line if incorporated into a company’s supply chain strategy. In the past, most companies were concerned primarily with forward logistics processes, and, to some degree, returning product to suppliers. Today, companies also focus on reverse logistics processes, not only from […]

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RFID: More Than Just a Better Barcode

Radio Frequency Identification Technology (RFID) offers a multitude of benefits that can significantly reduce and eliminate waste in the extended supply chain. RFID, an automatic identification method using electronic tags that have a microchip and printed antenna, is a lot more than just a small improvement from barcode technology. Barcodes offer a status report at […]

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Measuring to Manage or Barely Managing to Measure

Respondents to a Bain & Company survey say they run their supply chains only half as efficiently as top supply chain performers such as Toyota, Dell, and Home Depot. In fact, top-quartile performers spend just 4.2 percent of revenue on supply chain costs, compared to almost 10 percent for average performers in the same industry. […]

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Procurement and Purchasing: Buying into Lean

While supply chain costs, primarily procurement and transportation, can range from 50 to 70 percent of sales, some companies place too much emphasis on the traditional focus of reducing material costs in supply processes. Applying Lean principles to procurement and purchasing processes can identify non-traditional sources of waste, in some cases creating a paradigm shift […]

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How to Cut Seven Non-Traditional Wastes

In my first column for Inbound Logistics in 2012, I covered the seven traditional wastes identified in Lean thinking: Transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing, and defects, more commonly known by the acronym TIM WOOD. But there are other wastes to consider in your supply chain and logistics functions. Let’s examine the following seven non-traditional […]

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How Location Decisions Impact a Lean Strategy

Companies often don’t consider the location decision to be a Lean concept, but they should. Moving goods efficiently from raw material sites to processing facilities, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers is critical to remaining competitive in today’s global economy. When manufacturers make location decisions, their priority is to minimize cost. Retailers look to maximize revenue […]

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Designing a New Strategy for a New Year

With the New Year upon us, retailers and manufacturers need to rethink their supply chains and find new ways to work together, according to the 2016 Future Supply Chain, a report from the Global Commerce Initiative and Capgemini. Here’s a look at some external and internal industry trends from a Lean perspective. It’s not hard […]

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Supply Chain Integration + Collaboration = Time Travel?

Debunking these five myths helps retailers and manufacturers see the real value of dedicated returns management.

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A Lean and Agile Supply Chain: Not an Option, But a Necessity

In today’s global, dynamic economy, it is beneficial for companies to operate a supply chain that is both Lean and agile. Using Lean and agile in combination is known as having a hybrid supply chain strategy. A hybrid supply chain strategy may be appropriate for a company attempting to become a "mass customizer"—producing progressively smaller […]

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Selecting the Right Technology to Support Your Lean Operations

Technology plays a key role in enabling Lean supply chain operations. For example, connecting to suppliers in real time facilitates re-supplying parts and materials for a just-in-time production environment. But choosing the wrong software can create waste in terms of the time, effort, and money spent evaluating, selecting, implementing, and using the system. Surveys commonly […]

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Lean Retail: It’s About Time – and Money

Thanks to forward-thinking retailers such as Walmart and OfficeMax, Lean thinking is spreading in a variety of manufacturing sectors, including consumer goods, apparel, and food and beverage. These retailers have dramatically changed how products are ordered, moving inventory rapidly through their distribution centers to stores by gathering and sharing point-of-sale data with suppliers, and using […]

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Streamlining Inventory Through SKU Rationalization

While supply chain and logistics managers pursuing Lean operations generally seek to eliminate excess inventory, sales and marketing programs often lead companies to increase the volume of products they keep in stock. During the past few decades, the number of stockkeeping units (SKUs) retailers offer has soared. For example, in 1970, the average grocery store […]

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Collaborative Programs: Not a Chore But an Opportunity

Many corporate executives view the supply chain and logistics function as a source of savings through cost reduction. Their position is understandable, as supply chain and logistics costs can represent 50 to 70 percent of a company’s sales dollars. Making these operations more efficient and effective can have a great impact on the bottom line. […]

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Tapping Technology To Improve Lean Warehouses

Lean is traditionally thought of as a methodology for using visual signals, optimized layouts, and streamlined processes to improve material and information flow. But technology also plays a critical role in Lean operations, especially for companies managing global supply chains. Implementing forecasting, advanced planning and scheduling, distribution requirements planning, and transportation and warehouse management systems […]

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Putting a Lean Spin on Reverse Logistics

Reverse logistics—the processes involved with handling products returned by customers—is often overlooked during supply chain planning. As a result, it is frequently a source of waste, because companies lack Lean procedures for handling defective, damaged, mislabeled, or incorrectly shipped items when customers return them. Recently, businesses have started paying more attention to their reverse logistics […]

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