No matter what your company does or how you make your money, one thing every business has in common is the need for supplies. Manufacturing, IT, Financial, Logistics, Research and Development, Health Care and Education, all need a source of supplies that arrive in good condition on a timely basis.

Trimming the Fat in Your Supply Chain:

While every business has potential supply chain issues, companies that deal in manufacturing and production, retail and distribution, or supply intensive services like health care, are much more vulnerable to problems that can delay the arrival of supplies. Fortunately, there is an advanced Lean system called Kanban that can help you address and correct your supply chain issues.

What is Kanban?

It is a structured approach to the Supply Chain system that focuses on several aspects of your operation to help control the external aspects of your supply chain.

A goal of any Lean system is to have a Lean supply system as well. One that only stocks the minimum materials required to get the current work load out the door while assuring against shortages. This balancing of supply and demand can be complicated, especially if there are several different processes going on in your operation at the same time.

Its developers had to answer the problem of how to stock a company with enough supplies to cover the demand without locking capital up in materials that will sit on a shelf for days or weeks before being used. And they found the answer, or at least the inspiration, at the supermarket.

Retail food outlets have been dealing with just this problem for decades and many of the techniques for ordering, stocking, warehousing and waste control turned out to be very applicable in a manufacturing setup.

It also looks at the entirety of your supply chain with the object of creating a Just In Time Inventory System. That is timing orders to arrive on the day that the materials will be required for the production lines. An ambitious goal, but one which has been achieved more than once. But even reducing your stockpile of supplies by 50%-80% frees up tons of capital for other uses.

Uttana has a series of Lean Kanban Training Courses that can take you through developing and implementing a plan for your company.

Training Courses

The goals of Kanban require high levels of cooperation among many departments to be achieved. Kanban directly affects and interacts with:

• Forecasting
• Order Processing
• Production Scheduling
• Purchasing
• Receiving
• Warehousing and Stocking
• Production
• Accounts Payable

And that's just on the surface. To achieve the kind of interdepartmental cooperation required for this kind of operation, you will need a special kind of organization. That's where Hoshin Kanri Training Courses comes into play.

It means Policy Deployment, and is a structured system, much like Lean, designed to facilitate communication and cooperation between different aspects of the organization.

These courses available at Uttana are:

• Introduction: This course defines the concepts behind Hoshin Kanri and helps you to understand this approach to departmental interaction.

• Tools and Techniques: Just like the Lean Kanban Training Courses Methodologies, it has a specific set of techniques and processes that are used to achieve the desired results.

• Implementing in Six Steps: As the name implies, a step by step plan for implementing the concepts learned in the previous videos.