Category: Lean Process Improvement

On Time Delivery – Get that right First!

What Gets Measured Is What Gets Done!

No matter what industry you are in and no matter what channels you are serving your Customers expect delivery of their goods on time.

You may have different pressures, to increase profits for instance, but you must take care of the basic expectation of on time delivery first.

If you don’t have on time delivery all your other pressures will not matter.   Your customers will go elsewhere and your business will fail.  Even if you have a unique product that no one else in the world has (for now) you must deliver on time to your customers.  If not there will always come a time when your customers will be able to go elsewhere.

Providing on time delivery may seem basic.  But it is the foundation on which the rest of your business must be built.

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How Lean Manufacturing Can Transform Your Supply Chain Operations!

Can Lean Manufacturing Really Help Supply Chain?

Lean manufacturing in supply chain management emphasizes eliminating the superfluous and concentrating solely on what is vital. This approach aims to reduce waste and ensure that every supply chain component operates efficiently.

Discover how adopting this strategy can enhance your operations and why grasping its principles could be pivotal for your business success.

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The Agile Supply Chain! Why Agility is Trumping Lean!

A “Don’t Touch” Strategy will Dramatically Lean out your Supply Chain!
Get Our Inventory ManagementEBOOK HERE

The modern supply chain grows increasingly complex with each passing day. The digitization, focusing on fundamentals and change, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and many other factors are transforming how the agile supply chain functions.

Once, the lean supply chain was considered to be the most effective form of manufacturing and supply chain management. However, a new concept in supply chain processes, the agile supply chain, is quickly growing to replace the often overused term.

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Featuring Our 12 Best Global Process Excellence ™ Articles!

Unchaining Change Leadership

The company I had just joined had over two dozen logistics and distribution facilities around the world. While there were a lot of great people in those operations they had little interaction with their peers around the globe. But best global process excellence procedures were nowhere to be seen.

The result was that they operated as a series of islands, each developing and customizing every process for their own purposes. Over time this resulted in diminished operational and cost effectiveness and no optimization whatsoever.

And with customers looking at doing business in multiple facilities at the same time it was impossible to explain why this was not seamless given the inherent process disparities.

As such I launched a new program, Global Process Excellence™, to define and deploy the best, standardized processes everywhere. This article is a compilation of our best articles documenting that journey of leadership and discovery, which in some cases resulted in achieving Best in Class results.

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How to Improve Industrial Process Efficiencies!

10 Signs You Should Reboot Your Lean Program!
The Link Business Directory

Industrial efficiency is defined as a manufacturer’s ability to produce a product at the lowest possible cost that will allow them to make a profit. To calculate the industrial process efficiencies, the cost of production per unit must be compared to the unit output of that product. Ideally, industrial processes should have a lower cost per unit of output to be deemed efficient in any manufacturing plant. 

Efficiency can also be improved by limiting the number of wasted resources that are used to produce a specific product.

Read on to understand how industrial processes can be made more efficient.

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Cost Cutting! Brute Force or An Intelligent Program?

Is Your Supply Chain A Cost Centre or a Value Creator?

How many times have you been asked to cut cost?  How many times have you been asked to cut costs so deeply that it is beyond your comprehension?

In those situations you can always use the Brute Force method.  Hacking and slashing resources and expenses in this way often compromises the very capabilities, skills, morale and services that are keeping your company afloat in  the first place.  But it can be quick.

But if you have the chance to deploy a proper Change Management program to drive the cost reductions or other improvements that you are looking for then you may have many more constructive opportunities in front of you.

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A “Don’t Touch” Strategy will Dramatically Lean out your Supply Chain!

10 Signs You Should Reboot Your Lean Program!
Get Our Inventory ManagementEBOOK HERE

The box I was looking at in the Pick-To-Light (PTL)  lane was full of at least 1-2 dozen different skus with as many as one to twenty of each sku in the box.  It looked like the insides of a piñata in there.  Although a piñata is used in celebrations I was quite sure that when the retail store opened the box they wouldn’t be celebrating.

All along the PTL conveyor every box looked like an explosion of different skus in different quantities.  At every station an employee was following the lights and picking a different quantity of each sku from one set of boxes and putting them in the “piñata” box.

I knew that this was the way it had historically been done, and the company had just spent millions and millions of dollars automating this historic process, but from a Lean perspective the whole approach was wasteful, slow, and expensive.

Was it really necessary to touch every single piece of every single sku multiple times?

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Supply Chain as a Service (SCaaS)!

Preparing Business for the Digital Supply Chain! Oracle Interviews Mike Mortson!

I began my career working in a manufacturing plant within an international company that was completely vertically integrated. From component manufacturing through to subassembly manufacturing and end product assembly they did it all.

Within 10 years the company experienced a number of site closures and declared that manufacturing was no longer a core competency. For the site that I was a part of this meant that closure was an inevitability.

Faced with this stark reality we made the choice to spin off from the parent organization and start our own new company, entering the world of Contract Manufacturing.

This was my first experience with Outsourcing, or what I refer to as “Supply Chain as a Service” (SCaaS).

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Warehouse Cleaning Checklist! (Infographic)

A Comprehensive Warehouse Safety Guide!

Maintaining a high standard in warehouse cleanling is about more than just creating a more pleasant and attractive workplace. It can in fact contribute to greater safety, better employee health, longer-lasting equipment, reduced merchandise damage, and increased productivity. 

Warehouses can be hectic environments at the best of times, so sometimes it can be hard to find time for cleaning. To keep your warehouse spic-and-span, try to allot a few minutes at the end of every day for cleaning. Deep cleans do not need to be done as often, but you should aim to schedule them in at least once a month. 

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Introducing Lean In Retail … Start in the Backroom!

The Agile Supply Chain! Why Agility is Trumping Lean!

The Retail company I had just joined was undergoing a massive transformation.  Fundamentally the new merchandising strategy was to curate a dramatically different set of products from that which was carried historically, but in addition to what was carried historically.  What did this mean for the backroom in every store?

This meant that an enormous number of the business processes had to be transformed to support the new product set because management of the new merchandise required much different capabilities in all aspects of running a retail company.  Not only did this transformation require new capabilities but it also required  improvements to productivity and efficiency throughout the company.  And overall this meant a need for cultural change.

I decided that I would introduce Lean process improvement techniques to this company.

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Future of Energy for Manufacturing!

The Top 5 Impacts of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Logistics!

Today manufacturers must continually look for waste reduction, process improvement and supply chain efficiency to meet competitive pressures and their customers’ cost reduction requirements for the future of energy. Programs such as Lean have become a popular means to develop a culture of simplification and constant improvement. 

Although Lean principles provide an excellent basis for managing energy costs, such costs are often left out of an efficiency drive…

Why is that?

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Is Just In Time Past Its Time?

Featuring Our 10 Best Inventory Management Articles!
Get Our Inventory ManagementEBOOK HERE

The prospect of having a Just In Time (JIT) Supply Chain system has been the goal of innumerable businesses and industries for decades. And for those who have implemented Just In Time processes it has been the backbone of their entire operating structure.

But the global pandemic exposed the fragility of the Supply Chain in virtually every industry. We quickly ran out of healthcare supplies, toilet paper, and more. The extent of disruption has spread to lumber, steel, computer chips, automobiles, furnaces, and any number of additional products.

The fundamental principle of just in time delivery based on real time demand, combined with the unrelenting focus on inventory levels and faster inventory turnover, has created an operating paradigm that is great when things are going well, but which has proven to be ill-equipped to handle disruption the likes of which the pandemic has created.

Does that mean that a Just In Time philosophy has outlived its usefulness? Is JIT past its time?

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Global Process Excellence™: Defining the Roadmap for Best In Class Results

Global Process Excellence ™ : A Journey From Disarray To Best In Class!

“Global Process Excellence™” was to be the platform on which we would propel the company’s Operations upward toward Best In Class status.  Our Call To Action objectives were clear:

  • We had a clear requirement to improve our profitability
  • We needed to respond to customer expectations for increased value and a consistent, exceptional customer experience in all Distribution Centres
  • We needed to lean out the operations and improve our productivity
  • We needed to create Best in Class capabilities
  • We needed to enable profitable growth on the back of an enhanced Operating model, capacity and capabilities
  • And we needed to unleash the tremendous experience and expertise that resided within our employees

Now we needed to formulate our Roadmap: the Approach, the Mandate, a set of Ground rules, and a process of Governance to bring together everything that would now be called Global Process Excellence™.

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10 Signs You Should Reboot Your Lean Program!

Lean in the Back Office … Why is it so difficult?

How many people make a New Year’s resolution to adopt a Lean program and “Lean” yourself out only to abandon it shortly thereafter?

One of the top New Year’s resolutions is to start exercising. In January the local gyms are filled. But by February those gyms are much emptier and many of those well meaning people are still at home.

What do you do when your Lean program at work suffers the same fate? How do you know when your improvement program needs to be improved?

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4 Ways to Run a More Sustainable Business!

Start Your Business’ Sustainability Journey in 5 Steps!

A business owner has many responsibilities. They have to make sure profits are made while also ensuring that their employees are paid, taxes are filed, and so on. However, there is one aspect that has grown significantly in terms of importance and visibility in recent years: running a more sustainable business. 

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