Chapter List

Overview

Part Two of this book described basic principles and methods that could be used to bring speed and high quality to prioritized time traps within an activity or a workstation, a process, or a whole factory. Once you ve developed internal expertise on accomplishing Lean Six Sigma on an ever larger scale within your company, you can start to gain further leverage across your entire supply and distribution channels, from raw materials until the finished product reaches the customer. This chapter is going to pull it all together.

Just as only 20% of the workstations determine the velocity of the factory, the flexibility and velocity of the factory in turn determine distribution and channel inventories. Improving the velocity of your factory will have the same type of impact as improving the velocity of a single workstation. As the factory becomes faster, more flexible and adaptable, it can produce to actual demand (or at least an ever closer approximation) rather than to forecasts. This will greatly reduce the inventory needed in warehouses and distributor channels and improve responsiveness to customer needs.

Traditionally, most supply chain software has assumed a given factory velocity, and then optimized the distribution channels around that constraint using mathematical forecasting techniques, etc. In contrast, Lean Six Sigma assumes that factory velocity is not given, but rather can be substantially improved by making the factory...