SCM Lowdown

For Cost Cutting Include Lean in Supply Chain Perspective

As there many steps are employed in supply chain industry, the best can be termed like as segmentation of the customer base to provide well built and advanced services, increased transparency and forecasting abilities, taking advantage of latest support system and technologies.

The supply chain management has changed a lot in recent times from what it used to be 10 to twenty years ago. Two decades back there was more focus on controlling cost instead of other operations. However, with span of time even in supply chain, concepts like strategic sourcing, sharing real-time data and inclusion of suppliers in devising strategy in new product and services.

As with the introduction of new concepts, the professionals even in supply chain management has adopted themselves as according to the need and requirement of the latest period with the need of their respective organizations. They are now concentrating more over co-ordinating over various functions of the organization. They are now more focussed toward tracking and measuring risks to the supply chains. The more dedicated and concentrated efforts focusing with certain resources for the regular improvement resulted in the form of Lean Projects.

Lean strategy is more weaved around to eliminate waste in supply chain management. Still with prevalence in other industries is even quite popular in manufacturing industry. The lean projects got wide acceptance in supply chain due to capacity of saving that waste which is not visible to the naked eyes. A leaned process happens to be short, low level of operation and very short lead times to complete new orders resulting into the highest level of customer satisfaction.

Lean can help to save a large number of costing otherwise wasted during the processes of important operations like sea freight, air freight, rail freight or trucking and many other possible ways for price saving. Lean helps in great way for improving resource allocation scheduling and material handling. According to a large number of lean practitioners the biggest scope for the improvement in supply chain is better management of orders and quick delivery.

One can focus on proper training of SCM team in the Lean principles, tracking and eradication of basic problem not symptoms and follow principles of cycle time, throughput, work-in-process (WIP), yield, and uptime.

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