Supply Chain View

A lengthy post today that’s been in the pipeline for a while. The Lean Enterprise Institute have published an English translation of The Birth of Lean, recounting the experiences of the early Toyota practitioners, and how their experiences shaped what became Lean methods and thinking. The introduction and first chapter are available as a free […]

It’s a classic technique: follow an order from receipt to fulfilment. Shapiro, Rangan and Sviokla wrote an influential article on the subject in HBR in 1992 (Staple yourself to an order). Now, with more humour, a YouTube version. An outfit called Business Process Excellence in the US have posted an 8 minute animation on the […]

Sometimes people tell me that 5S only applies in factories, and if they’ve been exposed to the “inactive banana” school of dim-witted implementation I can’t blame them. But here’s a cautionary tale that might persuade you that the principles – intelligently applied – are sound. Supply Chain View has been “off air” for a while […]

As I’ve been working from home a lot recently, I’ve had the radio on to give the office a bit of a ‘buzz’ and today I overheard this story on BBC 6 Music. Camelot have withdrawn a lottery scratchcard because customers couldn’t work out when they had won. The customers’ confusion stems from the concept […]

Sometimes people get hung up on semantics. Sometimes it pays to be clear – very clear. I am currently trying to wade through some waters muddied by misunderstanding and poor use of terminology. My employer has had some good quality experience of Lean (albeit in a fairly small section of its operations) for about four […]

There was a pretty depressing story in the Guardian a few days ago that proposes, in typical newspaper hyperbole, that Britain is in the grip of a numeracy crisis. For once, the concern is justified. According to the article, there are 3 times as many UK adults with poor numeracy than poor literacy. That’s 15.1 […]

This is the second part of a two-part post. Part 1 was posted last week. 6. Optimise stock over the range The same investment in stock can produce better or worse levels of availability. This is intuitively obvious if we think of some reductio ad absurdum examples: all of our stock invested in a single […]

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 […]

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 […]