Supply Chain View

UPDATE 20/03/08: Since I wrote this post, Hopp has published a print version of the book with McGraw-Hill and moved from Northwestern to the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. As a result, the download that was available free from the Northwestern website is no longer available. Apologies to anyone who 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I was interested to find an article in this month’s Logistics & Transport Focus headed “No more lean times: why inventory is not waste and warehouses add value”. The author, Steve Sordy, has chosen a title that is a kind of teasing of the more dogmatic of lean devotees – British culture has little patience […]

I lent a hand yesterday at a workshop run with a client to aid configuration of an upgrade to their ERP system. The workshop, which focussed on DRP (Distribution Resource Planning) and Deployment (how we turn DRP plans into purchase orders and stock transfers), threw up the following problem. Manufacturer to Packer to Distribution Centre […]

My recent vacation in Morocco has inspired this post about the requirements for holding inventory in the retail supply chain. As I strolled around the souks – the traditional markets and shopping districts of North Africa and the Middle East – I reflected on the sheer quantity of stuff in the shops. Whether it was […]

In my report of the CILT HELP Forum I mentioned in passing the Certificate in Humanitarian Logistics. Yesterday the latest edition of CILTWorld dropped through my letterbox and I was delighted to see a 2-page spread on the qualification. Charles Muchiri – Head of Warehousing for the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross and […]

I have just read a paper published in the Jan 07 edition of the Journal of the Operational Research Society (JORS) entitled “A new approach of forecasting intermittent demand for spare parts inventories in the process industries”. The authors – ZS Hua, B Zhang, J Yang and DS Tang from the University of Science and […]

CILT(UK) launched the Humanitarian and Emergencies Logistics Professionals (HELP) Forum early last year with the aim of sharing best practice and developing the skills of those working in the humanitarian logistics field. (For more background see the HELP Forum page on the CILT’s website.) My own involvement in this – motivated by a longstanding interest […]