Table Of Contents hide 1 How a Lean Supply Chain Management Strategy Can Help 2 Hoshin Kanri 2.1 Contact Incito Consulting Group 3 Want to learn more? Schedule a consultation. 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. How a Lean Supply Chain Management Strategy Can Help A lean logistics strategy involves cutting waste from each part of the supply chain. Reducing waste in the supply chain not only helps alleviate some of the pressure caused by materials shortages, but it also makes the process more efficient and saves your company money in the long term. Your motivation for considering a lean strategy may be solely to keep your company afloat until supply production resumes. But a lean strategy lets you improve processes and procedures, making them more efficient and less wasteful. It not only helps you weather current materials shortages, but it also puts you in a position to be more profitable in the future. To develop your lean strategy, evaluate places in the supply chain where you can cut waste and improve efficiency. Factors to evaluate include product design, resource management, recycling of waste material and improved quality. Product design: Analyze your product and packaging design to see how raw material usage can be reduced or where you can replace raw materials that are currently in short supply. Resource management: There may be parts of your supply chain that produce excess waste. Look through these processes to see where changes can be made to reduce waste. Recycling of waste material: If your manufacturing process causes an excess of raw materials, see how they can be recycled or reused to manufacture additional products. Reusing materials not only reduces waste, but it also offers a solution to materials shortages. Improved quality: Pre-pandemic, your quality control methodology may have focused solely on the final product. Apply your quality control tactics throughout the supply chain to make the process more efficient and less costly. During your assessment, you can interview employees at every level. Because they know your processes intimately, they might have ideas for waste reduction and improved efficiency. You can ask them to explain parts of the process that can be refined. Devising a lean logistics supply chain strategy to cope with these challenges while making the manufacturing process more efficient can not only help you rebound, but it can also be more profitable and can help you be more prepared when similar difficulties arise in the future. Hoshin Kanri A reliable and proven methodology known as Hoshin Kanri can help you implement your lean logistics strategy. Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese strategic planning system that allows a company to establish its “True North” vision for the organization. Hoshin Kanri was developed by Toyota to realign the company’s vision, goals and strategies, allowing management to implement dramatic changes throughout the organization. Hoshin Kanri lets your business swiftly convert strategies into action by creating alignment across departments and teams. Because it involves creating a company-wide strategy that can be quickly disseminated to all employees, Hoshin Kanri makes it faster to implement strategic changes. Because your company is likely facing imminent challenges associated with materials shortages, quickly adopting a lean strategy can help you address them. You can refine your supply chain processes, saving money without compromising your customer service. Incito will work with you to swiftly deploy your strategy with our inspiring Strategy Deployment process. We will: Audit your quality control report to determine where you can implement changes in the supply chain to reduce waste. Develop innovative and sustainable supply chain strategy goals and objectives post-COVID-19. Create a lean supply chain strategy with action items and key tracking metrics. Create a supportive road map and cascaded action plans that enable employees on all levels to successfully implement your strategy. Contact Incito Consulting Group As the aftermath of COVID-19 presents new challenges for the manufacturing process, you may find yourself being reactive, dealing with issues as they occur instead of implementing a broad-based strategy that focuses on the future. But your chances of weathering the storm and emerging successfully can be improved with a company-wide strategy. A lean supply chain management strategy can not only stabilize your company during the post-COVID-19 storm, but it can also put you in a position to grow. Schedule a consultation to find out how Incito can help you implement your lean logistics strategy. Want to learn more? Schedule a consultation. About how Incito can help transform your business and tackle your most important strategic challenges.
