  
Combining the questions of green and sustainability with the application of lean thinking to supply chain and logistics I offer these current publications for your consideration.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, presents two cases 1) the impact of global warming, population growth, rise of a global middle class through globalization, and 2) America’s loss of focus and national purpose since 9/11, combine to ever greater instability. The rise of new powerful economic nations is completely changing the way the world works. Whether you buy in to the doom and gloom you might give some thought to how solving these problems present the greatest economic opportunity of our time.
Streamlined: 14 Principles of building & Managing the Lean Supply Chain by Mandyam M. Srinivasan stresses systems thinking. It integrates two management philosophies: the theory of constraints and lean thinking, and illustrating how they complement and reinforce each other to create the smooth flow of goods and services through the supply chain. Thought provoking.
End-to-End Lean Management by Robert Trent describes a broad array of waste that affects all supply chains and shows how to make lean performance improvement a reality across your entire supply chain. Trent he explains and details key lean objectives, including standardization, flow, optimization, and waste elimination. An easy read.
 Hot off the press, written by plant manager Brett Wills, with first hand experience on the challenges faced trying to move an organization in the green direction. Part 1, Going Green, applies value stream mapping and the ’seven wastes’ to identifying opportunities. Part 2, The Seven Green Wastes, provides guidelines for reducing each of the wastes.
Available at Amazon and CRC Press
In most warehouses the material handlers travel empty more than 60% of the time. Long pick paths and poor product placement can make labor even more inefficient. Slotting your warehouse based on travel distance and customer demand can save 5-10% on labor. When handling issues, product groups, order patterns are factored in an additional 3-5% labor productivity can be had. Also increasing storage density can create free space for additional opportunities; more efficient put away, right sizing bins, promotions and new product roll outs.
Finding the warehouse ’squatters’, the slow moving stock that’s sitting in the wrong place, isn’t too difficult. Squatters force the pickers to travel further to get to the active product locations. Over time squatters increase and migrate forward forcing longer and longer hunting trips. A quick and dirty way to find the squatters is to take your picking transactions and count the number of transactions and sort by location. A low number of picks in a location right next to one with high picks is a clue. Depending on your location address naming scheme this sorting can be confusing. Also, unfortunately spreadsheet slicing and dicing can only take you so far, typically only to making one pass on the product velocity. When you add other factors besides distance and velocity you need a better tool than Excel.
Slot3D by IDS Engineering is a warehouse slotting tool that combines AutoCAD with an economic algorithm that is highly visual, flexible, and powerful. Slot3D translates business rules into configuration parameters and along with SKU and order history calculates the picking, replenishment, and storage costs for each item and slot in the warehouse. The system recognizes different material handling equipment capabilities and location sizes and characteristics. Rules and restrictions provide mechanisms to prioritize areas of the facility to produce golden zones, bulls eyes, and hot zones. By allowing the user to structure the rules the software is flexible and not locked into a set of preconfigured algorithms.
The 3D capabilities of AutoCAD allow you to see the overall slotting optimization by providing a heat map of the facility.
Supply Chain design studies often target understanding the impact of new sourcing options such as switching suppliers, opening or closing facilities, new product line introductions, or business acquisition integration. Each opportunity has potentially great financial advantage, but also carries risks as well. The task then is to understand and quantify the risk – reward trade offs of operating cost vs customer lead time, inventory vs. service, fixed vs. variable cost. Unfortunately the various business goals need to be balanced and the complexities managed of customer demand, product dimensions, geography, shipping modes and rates. Sometimes a spreadsheet will do, often you need a more robust tool.
One complaint of modeling and simulation often heard is that the only one who understands the model is the modeler. Fair enough when the math is dense and the model a bunch of programming code.
 Supply Chain Guru by LLamasoft is one of the best of the many logistic network optimization and simulation software packages on the market today. With SC Guru model building is very visual. Sure there is a ton of data to manage; addresses, sales orders, shipment details, product dimensions, sourcing, inventory, and transportation policies. With the visual modeling native to the package you can display and interact with your data easily. As a user you can quickly create views of the supply network based on product or customer groups, geography, shipping lanes. Building the network diagram is as easy as with Visio or any other flow charting tool. Geo maps are easy to populate with built in longitude and latitude lookups. Distances come easily through the PC*Miler functionality.
Making the analysis more visual opens up the network study to greater team participation and leadership comprehension, and hopefully a better business result.
When asked recently to recommend reference books on Kanban here’s what I came up with…
  
Kanban for the Shopfloor is a straightforward implementation instruction manual. The language is plain and simple. The implementation checklist is complete. Kanban Just-In-Time at Toyota is a translation of a book published by the Japanese Management Association in 1986 and is based on the seminars given by Taiichi Ohno to Toyota suppliers. The language is a bit rough in places, but the concepts are presented in logical manner. The philosophical parts may not play well with factory workers, the prior book would be a better choice. Custom Kanban by Ray Louis comprehensive, detailed, and well written. The methodical approach offers some 20 design options for adapting the kanban tools to a variety of situations. This work is invaluable for implementors. All three works can be found at Amazon and Productivity Press.
|
|
-150x150.jpg "Andon(1)-150x150")
