Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains

Book Preface

Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains

Lean has become one of the most popular management methods for enhancing the competitive strength of manufacturing and logistics companies in the past few decades. Because the introduction of Lean involves all levels of management and employs a number of unfamiliar terms such as kanban, takt time, push, jidoka, mizusumashi, and muda, it has not been easy to understand its full implications.

Consequently, Lean has so far been introduced in bits and pieces in many companies and not as a total supply-chain management system. Although the benefits of Lean are gained only when the web of the total flows has been extended throughout all the supply-chain processes, few companies have realized the full benefit of kaizen in logistics and supply chains.

As a result, very few companies so far have succeeded in embracing Lean as a total system across their entire companies.

Euclides Coimbra’s book, Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains, has come at an opportune time, when many companies are going through reexamination of their supply-chain strategies in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the pressures of global competition. Many companies are seeking a road map to enable a quantum leap in improving their supply operations.

Coimbra’s book will be a perfect guide both to those who wish to embrace Lean for the first time in their factories, warehouses, supply chains, or planning processes and to those who have begun their journey but have enjoyed only marginal success in embracing Lean.

The gist of the book can be captured in the following quotes:

“For now, forget about the jargon and the acronyms. We only need to concentrate on making a total flow of materials and information and minimize it.”

“The information of the flow should come from the customer order and not from a sales forecast.”

“By creating and increasing the flow, you can improve quality, reduce cost and inventory, and meet diversified customer requirements in terms of volume and delivery.”

“Lean means to employ minimum resources for maximum output. Lean is what you gain as a result of building a Total Flow Management system.”

Sound simple? Yes, it is, because we are not talking about high-tech solutions but rather about daily, hands-on contacts with the realities on the shop floor. However, it does require everybody’s determination and commitment, which comes from kaizen.

Kaizen means ongoing, continual improvement and a mindset that is never satisfied with the status quo. Kaizen drives everybody to engage in the never-ending kaizen in logistics and supply chains. Coimbra says that you have to change the mindset, then change the gemba (shop floor), and then change the mindset again.

This book helps readers to review their activities and total supply chains from the vantage point of the flow and provides hands-on instructions for how to build a system based on kaizen in logistics and supply chains step by step. This book also includes a successful case study of a company that introduced kaizen in logistics and supply chains under the author’s guidance.

Sometimes the detailed steps of introducing total flow across the supply chain as outlined in this book may seem to be too complicated and cumbersome, but when you start practicing them, you will find that they work—because kaizen also means learning by doing. Kaizen in logistics and supply chains is very much an action-oriented program of learning by doing.

I do hope that this timely book will help readers to survive the Sturm und Drang period after the financial crisis and build an enterprise of lasting prosperity.

Masaaki Imai
Founder, Kaizen Institute