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 gone on a wild goose chase.

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I’m a real enthusiast for Wallace Hopp and Mark Spearman’s book Factory Physics. The authors have a refreshing approach to their subject: they explain why certain approaches work and others don’t, and they explain why problems occur. This does lead to a long and in places difficult book. But that is the price you pay for going further than the simplified prescriptions for success that fill too many business books.

So here is some excellent news: Professor Hopp’s book Supply Chain Science is available as a free download on Northwestern’s website. This volume – weighing in at a modest 157 pages – was written in 2003 and covers Read more »

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 the issue of “humanising” the working environment.

Hence my interest in this story from the Guardian work section 26 May 2007. It seems the Engineering Construction Industry Association want to scrap 10-minute tea breaks for their workers. A proposed national agreement has been rejected Read more »

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 president of Toyota, told his company to “catch up with America in three years – otherwise the automobile industry will not survive”. Read more »

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 wrote drawing on his experiences of developing the Toyota Production System. John Miller from Gemba has been very busy putting up chapter summaries of the whole book.

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 for zealots of any stamp, and prefers to deal with them with dry irony.

Sordy makes some good points about value-adding activities that can occur in warehouses, such as late customisation, reformatting and returns processing. You could argue he muddies the waters a little by considering activities that could equally happen in stockless distribution centres, but overall it was a good summary.

Where I part company with the article Read more »

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

The supply chain consists of Manufacturers, a Packing Plant, and a number of Distribution Centres (DCs). The DCs hold stock for Read more »

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 the heavily developed tourist souk of Marrrakech (all souvenirs and faux antiques) or the local-dominated souk of Meknes (traditional dress-up clothes and contemporary fashions), the quantity and variety of products in the stores was astounding.
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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 Red Crescent Societies) Regional Logistics Centre in Nairobi, Kenya – is one of the first candidates on the programme. He says Read more »

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 Technology of China, Hefei, PRC – have produced an interesting case-based study of the petrochemical industry which illustrates some more general points.

The authors looked at the spare parts requirements for the maintenance of capital equipment in a mid-sized Chinese plant (capacity 400m tonnes petroleum). The product range was broad (35,000 parts) with a large proportion of slow-moving, intermittently-demanded parts.
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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 in development issues and encouraged by a personal network of professionals in that field – has been to promote the knowledge management aspects of the Forum’s mission. The first small step was the introduction of the HELP bulletin board, hosted on this site, to make coordination between meetings easier.
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