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?
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.
The overarching strategy for limiting exposure to, and spreading of, the Coronavirus is that of Social Distancing. We are all instructed to keep 6 feet apart from anyone, wear masks, and avoid any social gatherings and don’t touch. How does this relate to a Don’t Touch Supply Chain strategy?
Even with social distancing, the global lockdowns, temporary closures of many businesses and disruptions of economies everywhere there are still Supply Chains in action, as disrupted as they may be.
Truckers are still moving goods to points of consumption and essential services such as grocery stores are still in operation, providing the basic goods we all need to live. Everyone involved in these Supply Chains is abiding by the social distancing and protective mandates we all are adhering to.
How can Supply Chains be changed in the future to make them more robust and resilient and less disrupted by any future catastrophes, and god forbid, a future pandemic?
One approach is to develop and deploy Don’t Touch Supply Chain strategies!
Creating a Responsive Supply Chain in advance of the peak shopping season is a no-brainer. While the season is usually described as the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas, responsive processes have a lasting effect.
A Responsive Supply Chain offers greater flexibility with labor management, streamlines warehouse operations, reduces dock constraints, and much more. Managing the balance between peaks and lulls is essential, and supply chain leaders are starting to focus more on building responsive, proactive strategies well in advance of the peak holiday shopping season.
As noted by Inbound Logistics, “Many manufacturers start assembling products, mapping out product specs to determine capacity needs, and working with their transportation and distribution partners on reliable and cost-effective logistics solutions up to six months in advance.”
Business effectiveness is a difficult metric to define, let alone track. But it is something that can be keenly felt, whether by managers overseeing a project or by the staff working against institutional inefficiencies.
I retired from a multi-national supply chain management company to become a co-owner of a label manufacturing company, which was a real culture change for me.
In the past discussions were held with a Director or Vice President of Supply Chain or Procurement or even the Chief Operations Officer about the design or re-design of the Supply Chain. In my new position, I get to meet the buyers or an executive in charge or procuring labels. In some companies they are categorized as “Consumables”.
There is very little high level attention paid to labels due to the low cost of the labels which can be a few cents to less than a cent. Many buyers feel that the labels are such insignificant parts of the product and place very little time and attention in the sourcing and procurement of the labels.
My first Management job was on the Manufacturing floor on 3rd shift. It was company policy … anyone’s first Management job was in Manufacturing. The principle was sound: to really understand how the business operated you needed to be at the very core of what it did, which in this case was Manufacturing. Only then could you really learn the business and how to work with people.
So as I started a new job further along in my career, with responsibility for Distribution Centres around the world, I knew that I was not going to learn what I needed to know from behind a desk looking at Powerpoint slides with pictures and statistics. I needed to go to each and every facility and learn about the operation right from the floor.
We had to begin the transformation of the company’s business processes to support the new business objectives. This would mean value stream mapping the current state process. Specifically the company was going to carry a dramatically different set of products which required a new set of capabilities in Strategic Planning, Merchandising, Marketing, Procurement, Inventory Management, Retail Operations and Logistics.
That scope defined the set of processes we needed to change first. The overall goal was to enable the transformation of the company which would manifest itself in higher revenue, improved growth and profitability, greater customer satisfaction and superior employee engagement.
We decided to attack this by introducing the Lean technique of Value Stream Mapping to the organization. We had to start with mapping the Current State process.
The retail company I had joined had just invested $25 million to automate their Distribution Centre. They automated the process of fulfilling orders in individual units, or eaches, instead of case fulfillment.
As I learned more and more about the system and the operation it became obvious to me that the entire paradigm that went into the $25 million investment was wrong. They wasted at least $20 million by perpetuating individual unit.
They could have save a lot of time and money by changing their fundamental operating model to one of case fulfillment – the Retail Holy Grail!
Big projects require big thinking and a tight knit ship. Every team has its strengths and every team has its flaws. Agile management moves to highlight these in an intricate way and find a way through with fast impact.
To successfully action agile management for any project, there are five clear steps to take. This guide has the information you need.
Wow! This was the headline caption on the presentation I was about to see. I had just joined the company. I had just spent the last few years in Retail. I had done a lot of research on how to improve efficiencies and productivity in Online/E-Commerce Fulfillment Distribution Centres. And I had lived through the agonizing process and resource challenges of fulfilling E-Commerce orders during the Holiday season, which is far and away the busiest time of the year in Retail.
Does your business struggle with process ownership? Are your process improvements not “sticking”? The failure of an organization to have in place well-functioning process owners is a common occurrence these days.
The root causes (if anyone cares to do a full postmortem) are numerous. We’ve heard it all before; “the organizational structure won’t allow for it”, “incentives are misaligned”, “leaders don’t understand what it takes to be a process owner” etc. I’m sure we can all relate to some or all of these statements.
Major players like Amazon and Walmart have distribution centers all over the world, pumping out packages at lightning speed.
If you want to keep your customers satisfied, you need to keep things moving in your warehouse or distribution center. Use these tips to keep up the pace and make your facility as efficient as possible.
We hear about all of this cool and exciting new technology every day. Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Drones and Autonomous Vehicles, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Big Data and more.
As such it’s easy to become enamoured with the prospects of implementing these brand new technologies in your company.
But for many companies they are struggling each and every day just to get the basics right. Ensuring deliveries are on time, making sure purchase orders are placed, changed, and acknowledged, keeping track of and reducing inventory levels, managing forecasts and forecast accuracy, and training and retaining resources are just a few of the basics that companies are working vigilantly to address every hour of every day.
Given pressures to reduce costs, improve productivity, increase competitiveness and increase asset velocity what should your strategic focus be?
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