Supply Chain

Lean Supply Chain

Our Lean Supply Chain team specializes in identifying your manufacturing process strengths and weaknesses, assessing your various departmental links—and then implementing solutions, to help ensure your manufacturing supply chain operates at its maximal effectiveness by eliminating inefficient procedures and protocols. 

Key Lean Supply Chain Elements

Product Flow- In many supply chains, products tend to move forward in a “push” system.   Under this system (in response to forecasts) inventory is built to a consistently high level which clearly strains working capital, while increasing lead-time, scrap, and rework.​
Customer Demand-  As total cost becomes an overall initiative, organizations are beginning to investigate the entire customer/supplier network for potential improvements.  
Information Flow- A robust supply chain must work with accurate information starting with forecasting to delivery of products to end-users.   Supply and demand should be synchronized considering factors such as service levels, variability, events, and capacity as processed by technology platforms and users of the information.​
Customer/Supplier Linkages- Forecasts are essential to the supply chain, if for no other reason, than to support financial planning.   It provides rough-cut capacity planning data, and a basis for negotiating annual supplier blanket agreements.
A Lean Supply Chain is a continuous process of improvement in the corporate manufacturing system. It includes information sharing, manufacturing processes, and finished products that different departments or companies contribute to. These departments or companies are links. We treat every individual link as interconnected and dependent parts of the entire system, or the chain. 

The goal of a Lean Supply Chain is to deliver products or services at the lowest total cost to the customer, by making sure every link continues to function optimally within the larger chain—which results in the elimination of wasteful practices, and the optimization of efficiency, customer service and profit margins across the board.

VIPGroup’s Lean Supply Chain Experts
Value Innovation Partners Ltd. specializes in Lean implementations for businesses of all types and sizes. Our continuous improvement experts are known throughout the corporate world for their expertise, precision, professionalism and high success rate.  Contact us today to see how your business, your customers, and your bottom line can immediately benefit from our experience.
We understand that implementing a Lean Supply Chain system into your business is customized and personalized based on factors unique to your business model. Therefore, our team will develop and help implement protocols that meet the specific needs of your business, while ensuring that:
VIPGroup engagements are organized to provide the least disruptions to ongoing operations.
The timing of the interactions with your personnel is planned and organized with your senior management before any work begins.
That throughout every engagement, our team provides continual updates to your senior management on the progress made.
That cash flow and profitability must be retained during any engagement.
Providing growth for your employees, as well as personal accountability of implemented processes and products.

Supply Chain Reading

Why You Should Care About Lean Supply Chain

Just a Few of Our Client Companies

Seven Steps for Building a Lean Supply Chain

Once our team has identified the inefficiencies present within your business’s four main links, we begin implementing our seven-step strategy for streamlining and optimizing your business’s manufacturing chain. These steps are:
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​1. Developing a Holistic Perspective: Recognizing the optimization of each link must take place with the other links in mind in order to be effective. Relationships between each link, including communication and mutual understanding are essential to the long-term success of the chain.
2. Understanding Your Customers: Knowing the economic and intrinsic value of your product or service in the customer’s eyes, including what your competition offers your customer that might take them away from you. ​
3. Mapping a Value Stream: illustrating the structure of physical and informational flows within your supply chain, in order to identify links that are effective, as well as ones that need attention.
4. Benchmark Best Practices: As your value stream mapping takes shape, turn your effective protocols into benchmark standards for the lesser efficient links in the chain.​
5. Design Products and Processes for Customer Demand: Understanding customer volatility patterns, in order to accurately determine ebbs and flows in product or service demand. This helps eliminate overstock inventory.​
6. Control Product Flow: Structuring product offerings so that the commitment of materials and resources is postponed for as long as possible. Or working with a relatively small number of standard products or modules, in semi-finished form that configure to a larger variety of end products.​
​7. Performance Metrics: Developing standardized but flexible statistical reports that identify and synthesize the cost and profit of every link in the supply chain, as well as the finished product. ​