Not only is your company being impacted by COVID-19 related labor and material shortages in logistics, but your vendors and clients are also likely feeling the stress. Optimizing your supply chain processes improves efficiency and reduces wasted time and materials. Taking it a step further and creating a pull system approach to order fulfillment — one that’s based on lean principles — is another way to reduce waste. It helps you improve your production quality and frees you of excess inventory.
Effectively implementing your lean supply chain management strategy can help your business survive post-pandemic labor and materials shortages. Your value stream map that we discussed in part 2 shows you wasteful parts of your production and administrative procedures that you can revise for increased efficiency. You can also take your workplace into consideration.
Now that you’ve developed your lean supply chain management plan, you’re ready to begin taking a clear look at your supply chain to see how you can reduce waste in light of labor and materials shortages. While creating your strategy, you may have already taken a broad assessment of your supply chain and identified where to reduce waste. This step allowed you to create your overarching goals and vision for your supply chain strategy. It also let you create action items and get all of your employees on board with sweeping changes. Now, it’s time to take a deeper dive into your supply chain and use value stream mapping to create a visual representation of your business enterprise and supporting processes.
While the economy continues to rebound from COVID-19, manufacturing activities are picking up. You may be relieved to have emerged from pandemic-related difficulties and are now looking at increased demand for your products. However, as customers go about their daily business and your orders increase, you may now face labor and raw materials shortages, making orders harder to fill. To fully rebound, your business must re-examine its capacity and capabilities, deploying a comprehensive lean supply chain management plan that helps you navigate post-pandemic supply chain difficulties.
In this post-COVID-19 world, organizations must redefine their goals, strategies, organizational structures and business processes in order to stay alive. From footprint and layout to social distancing process flow optimization, businesses must re-evaluate their current processes and adapt if they want to survive the effects of this pandemic.
At the very crux of the lean sigma strategy is to be able to cope with crises, both small and large. COVID-19 is certainly a large crisis where many businesses are learning as they go. But if you have a Lean Six Sigma Process under your belt, you will find you can weather any storm.
Incito can help transform your business and tackle your most important strategic challenges during this pandemic.
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