Productivity Solutions Limited: Leading Lean Implementation and Supply Chain Solutions Provider

Although lean thinking is typically applied to manufacturing lean techniques and focus are applicable anywhere there are processes to improve, including the entire supply chain, including wholesalers, distributors, retailers and others. A lean supply chain is one that produces just what and how much is needed, when it is needed, and where it is needed.

Lean supply chain management is not about "fixing" what someone else is doing wrong. It is about identifying and eliminating waste as measured in time, inventory and cost across the complete supply chain. This requires continuous effort and improvement.

WHAT IS LEAN SUPPLY CHAIN?
Lean is how a properly designed and operated supply chain should function. A lean supply chain process has been streamlined to reduce and eliminate waste or non-value added activities to the total supply chain flow and to the products moving within the supply chain. Waste can be measured in time, inventory and unnecessary costs. Value added activities are those that contribute to efficiently placing the final product at the customer. The supply chain and the inventory contained in the chain should flow. Any activity that stops the flow should create value. Any activity that touches inventory should create value.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE TO BE LEAN?
Supply chains gain waste and non-value added activities for many reasons, both internal to the company and external. Regaining the lean supply chain may mean addressing many of the same issues that created the problems of extra and unneeded time, inventory and costs.

The ideal approach is to design the perfect supply chain and fit your company's operation onto it. Supply chain management is meant to reduce excess inventory in the supply chain. A supply chain should be demand driven. It is built on the pull approach of customers pulling inventory, not with suppliers pushing inventory. Excess inventory reflects the additional time with the supply chain operation. So the perfect supply chain would be lean with removing wasteful time and inventory.
A supply chain, with the pull, flows back from deliveries to the store or to the customer warehouse back through to purchase orders placed on suppliers. Anything that delays or impedes this flow must be analyzed as a potential non-value added activity.

Some benefits of a lean supply chain:
• Improved work flow
• Reduction in response time by 10 to 40%,
• Reduction in inventories by 10% to 30%
• Reduction in costs by 10% to 25%

Continuous improvements can take payback to the upper range-and beyond. This is a significant benefit to ROI and to the bottom line.
Components of the Lean Supply Chain
• Lean Suppliers
• Lean Procurement
• Lean Warehousing
• Lean Transportation
• Lean Customers