Improve Your Supply Chain with Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is a framework for improving the performance of your supply chain. It’s a structured approach that combines statistical techniques like Lean and Six Sigma to provide you with quantifiable data about your business to make better future decisions. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how Supply Chain with Lean Six Sigma boosts efficiency  — and how it might benefit yours!

What is Lean Six Sigma?

Lean Six Sigma is a data-driven approach to eliminating waste. It’s an improvement methodology, a set of tools and techniques, and, more importantly, a way of thinking.

Lean is about eradicating waste in any system by identifying and eliminating unnecessary steps in the process. This can be done by improving efficiencies or reducing the time it takes to complete tasks—which sometimes means adding manpower or outsourcing specific processes to make them run more efficiently. For example: if there’s too much inventory sitting around in your warehouse because you’re not using it as efficiently as possible (or at all), your business isn’t lean enough yet!

Why is Lean Six Sigma Good for the Supply Chain?

Lean Six Sigma is a systematic approach to problem-solving. It’s an open-systems approach, meaning it can be used to solve problems anywhere in the supply chain. It encourages the use of data over opinion.

Lean supply chain strategy is quantitative because it uses numbers and statistics to find answers, rather than relying on intuition or experience alone.

Improve Demand Planning

Demand planning is the process of forecasting demand for a product. It’s a crucial part of the lean supply chain and a highly complex process. Demand planning is easily one of the most critical tasks in lean manufacturing and six sigma processes.

If you want to improve your supply chain lean, you need to understand how vital demand planning can be.

Many points in the supply chain can benefit from the Lean technique of Poka-Yoke. This mistake-proofing approach averts human error by forcing the user to complete the task accurately.

Improve Inventory Management

Six sigma in inventory management is your solution if your inventory is likely to cost your company a lot of money. A National Institute of Standards and Technology study found that over half (57 per cent) of non-discretionary inventory costs are due to overstocking.

Here’s how this plays out:

• • • If a piece of machinery breaks.
    • If an employee gets sick and you don’t have enough staff on hand to do their jobs.
    • If some other unexpected event disrupts production, having too much stock means there won’t be any buffer between orders placed by customers and shipments arriving at stores.

If you’d had just enough stock in place before the disruption, you would have no problem getting things back online as quickly as possible. But when juggling too much inventory on any given day, it can be difficult for anyone involved in the process to catch up with customer demand around the globe. This is how you improve Inventory Management.

Take Supply Chain to the Next Level With Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is an approach to improvement that uses a combination of the best practices of Lean and Six Sigma. It helps you identify waste in your supply chain and eliminate it so you can focus on what is essential to your business.

Successful supply chain management with Lean focuses on eliminating waste from a process through continuous improvement while helping to make more efficient use of resources. This means decreasing costs while increasing customer satisfaction, which is what every supply chain needs!

Conclusion

Supply Chain with Lean Six Sigma is your way to go. The process not only helps you reduce costs but also increases revenue and customer satisfaction. This article has covered some of the main benefits of implementing lean supply chain management in your business. With these tips in mind, you should be able to implement a successful program at your company that will help improve your supply chain!

Visit Lean Partner for operational excellence.