Lean supply chain conference proves valueable

Danny Lane of Integrated Hydraulics said it was “thought provoking” and Eammon O’Brien of Sunrise Medical said it was “an excellent event for enabling one to re-immerse in lean principles”. What made the event a success was the speakers – Dan Jones (pictured) opened proceedings with his thoughts on the challenge of supply chain compression. Before you start with lean in the supply chain though, he warned that you should look at “what have you done in house. What is the total time to add value in your factory? Less than 1 hour value creating time should take less than 1 day to complete,” he said. It was a theme of the day that analysis of the value stream in the factory and in the supply chain was crucial to becoming more lean. Jones gave examples from Tesco, Zara and Toyota. Ted Hutchin of the TOC-Lean Institute said that he has been finding the links between “Theory of Constraints” and Lean to be very strong. “If you do TOC without lean, you are in difficulty, and if you do lean without TOC, you take a while to hit the right target,” he said. Hutchin covered various measures that he saw as crucial in the supply chain, and gave examples from companies such as Dell. Enrico Camerinelli from The Supply Chain Council spoke of analysis of the supply chain using a model to aid understanding, detailing examples from shoe manufacturers, and Derek Thomason from Unipart spoke about how the company now has a vision to become “the ultimate supply chain partner.” Paul Myerscough, MD of James Walker and Co, described how in his business and supply chain, the use of both communication/policy deployment and also IT have both helped. Dave Nelson, formerly of Honda, Delphi and TRW amongst others, explained how the building of trust and collaboration in the supply chain really made the difference in the companies that he had worked, saying that particularly Honda had: “a trust and collaboration model which goes much further than most of us would think about.” Philip Tugwell from MCP Management Consultants helped the delegates understand how ‘reliable assets’ are key in any supply chain, and Simon Box of ED&S (part of Honeywell) covered some case studies with details on how to introduce lean into multi-cultural supply chains. The event was held at The Heritage Motor Centre at Gaydon, and was sponsored by QAD, TBM Consulting, Oracle and Smallpeice Enterprises. For details on future events like these, visit the events section of this website.