Unleash Your Employees’ Ideas to Truly Change the Game!

Organizations that are either considered high performing or who aspire to become high performing understand that their employees are their greatest asset.  A company can only achieve its overall objectives if their employees are aligned, on board and driving toward those goals, and if their ideas are heard.

At its core your employees understand how well or how poorly the day-to-day processes in your company run better than anyone else.  They also have tremendous ideas on how to improve those processes, how to improve your metrics, and how to achieve your objectives.

So how do you tap in to that intellect, unleash those ideas, and empower your employees in an organized and efficient manner?  How do you get your finger on the pulse of what is on your employee’s minds?

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Achieve Breakthrough Results! Go From Worst to First!

We launched the Global Inventory Turnover Breakthrough project on April 1st.  It was not a joke.  Our challenge was to improve Inventory turnover from 6.3 turns to over 8.6 turns within the year.  This was a level of achievement that the company had never before reached, let alone thinking about going from Worst to First.

But we had the Call to Action.  Our Inventory turnover was perennially the worst in our industry.  Our Inventory levels were consuming an enormous amount of cash as well as creating a lot of expense in carrying charges.  And this had the effect of driving our Return on Invested Capital to very low, unattractive levels.  Further there were ongoing complaints that even though we had a lot of inventory we  never had all of the right material that was needed.

We had the motivation to turn this situation around.  What we didn’t know is that we were about to make history and go from Worst to First!

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World Class Inventory Turnover Infographic!

Achieving World Class Inventory turnover performance is an aspiration, a requirement and a challenge for many companies.  We’ve written several blogs on this subject to share our experiences in achieving truly game changing results in inventory management.

Attacking just a single element of inventory has, in our experience and observation, proven to be an insufficient approach to making significant, sustainable changes.  The entire ecosystem of processes, variables, and stakeholders requires taking a holistic approach enlisting a variety of tools and techniques (eg. lean inventory management) to drive game changing inventory performance.

Given the breadth, depth and complexity of the Inventory Turnover management ecosystem it is not surprising that there is much to be addressed in this area.  We’ve captured much of this in our article Featuring our Top 10 Inventory Management articles

In this blog article we’ve captured much of this content in a single Infographic

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Future of Energy for Manufacturing!

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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The Internet of Things (IoT) – Welcome the Digital Supply Chain!

Over the last 5 years there has been an explosion of smart and connected devices. Gartner is predicting that by 2020 there will be 37 Billion connected devices and more than 4.3 Zetabytes of data generated by these devices.  The Internet of Things (IoT) is well upon us!

Quick adoption of health devices like Fitbit and smart thermostats such as Nest are bringing more and more connections and opportunities into the consumer world. As such many home appliance and consumer goods companies are looking at how they can take advantage of this trend and transform their interaction with their consumers and customers.

In order to understand how this is starting to evolve and how it will impact and change the digital supply chain, let us consider 4 user cases that are emerging with early adopters in this space.

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