Lean Supply Chain : Case Study

Production practices have had an important role in satisfying the dynamic market. Many approaches have being developed in order to respond effectively to specific business requirements. In fact, some areas of management have focused its study on the overseeing, designing, and controlling the process of production in an effort to find the best methodology that ensures the business success and performance. However, complexities arise in this field because many variables such as costs, inventory, scheduling, suppliers, etc have to be considered in any business. Lean approach and the traditional approach are two points of view that aim to address this complexities, and those will be examined in this essay.

Success for many organizations depends on the firm’s ability to balance product and process changes while exceeding customer expectations for improved cost delivery and quality. In lieu of these issues firms have started to implement principles of supply chain management. Supply chain management mainly involves managing the flow of incoming materials, manufacturing operations, and downstream distribution has to be in alignment that is responsive to change in customer demands eliminating a surplus of inventory.

A supply chain is a net work of firms. Thus, each firm in the chain should build its own supply chains to support the competitive priorities of its services or products. Two distinct designs used to competitive advantage are efficient supply chains and responsive supply chains. Efficient supply chains work best in environments where demand is highly predictable. The focus of the supply chain is on efficient flows of services and materials keeping inventories to a minimum. The firm’s competitive priorities are low-cost operations, consistent quality, and on-time delivery. Responsive supply chains designed to react quickly in order to hedge against uncertainties in demand. Work best when firms offer a great variety of services or products and demand predictability is low. Typical competitive priorities are development speed, fast delivery times, customization, variety, volume flexibility, and top quality. Tables below show the environments and design features that best suit each design.

variety of reasons throughout this text, they can all be related to some or all of the

Overall, the purpose of lean is to improve processes. Lean is not a methodology that seeks for the reduction of costs, even though it might appear as a result of a great implementation of Lean. Neither is a methodology to improve productivity, as it might require to do more work that do not necessarily means that the staff is doing the right things. Lastly, Lean is not about restructuring the work the staff do, as it might simply mean changing activities without considering if they are actually value added or not.

“Lean means creating more value for customers with less” (Krejewski, L., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K., 2013). Implementing this into a project can make the project very successful at a lower rate of cost and time. There are five steps in allowing the lean process to work successfully. This process is easy to remember but not always easy to achieve. Specifying the value from the customer’s point of view of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing is the first step. Identifying all the steps of value for the product the customer wants to purchase and eliminating the steps that are unnecessary is the second step. Creating a sequence of steps that flow in a consistent fashion and will flow smoothly toward the customer is the third step. Introducing the flow of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing and allowing the customer to pull value from the product is the fourth step. The fifth and final step in the lean technique process is “as value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste” (Lean Enterprises Institute, 2015).

Lean is an approach that can be used in every organization to increase customer satisfaction, decrease costs, improve quality, and increase the output, by eliminating waste and creating value (Manos & Vincent, 2012, p.1).

Lean Manufacturing is actually a concept by way of the removal of all waste from any process associated with expense with the goal of a greater return by introducing additional products or processes that would be invested for a greater return on every dollar spent. For instance, how much more groceries can a family purchase if they could get paid for the right purchases made throughout the month, without sacrificing quality and usefulness.

Lean is defines the manufacturing philosophy that reduces the time between the shipping and customer demand, which based on the systematic method by eliminating waste, that means giving the customer what they want when they want it, and don 't waste whatever. Rahmana, Sharif and Esa (2013) suggested lean production is mentioned to improve the company 's performance from the philosophy in reducing waste in order. That means, lean system destination is the decrease cost by removing the non-value activities, which they are applying a category of tools and techniques for checking and eliminating defective in the production process. In the Evenort Company should emulate the five overriding principles of lean thinking in terms of implementing lean that there is guarantee the company has been driving correctly in the lean manufacturing (Cardiff 2015) as can show in table 1.

Supply chain management is a main process in all kinds of companies. That’s because an optimized supply chain results in lower costs and a faster production cycle.

In fact the just-in-time principle is one aspect of a broader philosophy represented by the Toyota production system. In TPS, the just-in-time concept is one pillar and the other is to build in quality at every step of the process, not allowing defects to propagate through the value stream. The

Lean originally comes from the thought of scarce resources. The Japanese automotive manufacturer called Toyota was the one who introduced this method with innovations such as JIT, and so forth [14; 44; 28]. Lean operations were used as a different method for capital-intensive mass manufacture in order to help firm use resources more effectively and efficiently. As a result, the firm will be able to reduce muda activity and non-value adding tasks. The procedure of lean implementation and research had been widely used by many organizations across the world. Conglomerates found out that the manufacturing process need not only improvement in performance, but also the development must be extended and

In short, lean production is essentially about receiving more from less. The point of this idea is to lessen the amount of assets or quantity, so the main focus can be utilized as a benefit for selling products and furthering assistance to customers. All while in sync, it is about making the association of the business or supply chain more productive, vaulable and more importantly effective. Lean production can be characterized from various perspectives, however the most mainstream is the “elimination of all waste and continuous improvement of productivity.” (Arnold, Chapman, 2012, p.340) Waste means something besides the base measure of hardware, parts, space, material, creation time and laborers ' time which make it completely important to increase the value of the item. Lean production is built on various effective ideas such as continuous improvement, organizing the business, and just-in-time production, which makes lean production so effective in supply chains. Lean production includes wiping out what might be wasteful and hence utilizing less energy, supplys, capacity and time. In return, this lessens costs and helps companies, such as supply chains, excel in business.

Andrew Peacock started out by telling us what LEAN is and isn’t. The first time I heard LEAN I did think it stood for something, but Andrew reassured us that it is not an acronym nor does it have anything to do with working out to get lean. Because that is what you will get if you type it into Google. But what he did tell us is that LEAN is a process of evaluating and doing whatever it takes to improve. This process helps clear up waste from an organization, like making sure that customers don’t stay on the phone too long without talking to someone, or spending unnecessary time looking for something in an office because it was not put in the right place. Just like our first guest speaker, Dave Klug, Andrew mentioned that LEAN does not happen without culture.

Lean is a process where creating more value to customers by minimizing wastage, time with less resources. Lean organization understand the customer value and try to increase proceed which adding more value to the business. In order to accomplish the lean thinking