Has lean reached its peak? This question was posed by IndustryWeek in a recent column, which posits that manufacturers may be at the limit of internal operational efficiencies and savings that may be achieved through lean. So what's next? Extending those practices and principles to create a lean supply chain.
That means that manufacturers should be looking to their supply channel partners – including distributors – to ensure that they are also embracing a streamlined process that complements the practices of others in the supply chain.
As Adam Fein, president of Pembroke Consulting, noted in Building a Lean Channel, executives in wholesale distribution will be disappointed with their investments in supply chain technology unless they understand how channel relationships must change to capture the real business benefits.
Here are three tips from our archives on how distributors can help create that lean supply chain:
- Focus on improving dialogue with channel partners. Upgrade channel management dialogues with suppliers so that both parties can reduce costs and raise productivity, Fein says. It's a principle that electronics distributor Avnet embraces as critical to success in a global supply chain. These conversations need to take place at the top – which means management needs to be involved in the entire process.
- Share knowledge. “Knowledge and learning go hand-in-hand,” lean expert Chuck Emery says in A Practical Approach to Lean. For the success to be long-term, the process for accumulating and sharing knowledge needs to be standardized. Create a repository of processes and make sure management understands the process as well as the workers do.
- Encourage improvement. Too often there's a negative connotation around lean, says Lynn Bachstein, Wilkes-Barre, PA-based Benco Dental's "Queen of Lean," in Lessons Learned on Lean. Reassure employees that it's not about people losing their jobs; it's about working smarter not harder. Lean is about continuous improvement, and the best people to understand what can be improved are the people doing the actual doing.
