
Books & Stories
Lean Fulfillment Stream
Winner of the Shingo Research Award for Operational Excellence
Lean logistics veterans Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe have co-authored the Lean Enterprise Institute’s Shingo Award-winning workbook, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream. Building on the concepts of waste, flow, and pull, this pioneering workbook illustrates how to analyze the traditional supply chain as a flowing stream of products and information.
The workbook gives practical insights
Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream provides the steps to a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers. Using clear examples, the workbook gives practical insights into two critical supply chain concepts:
1) Calculating the total cost of fulfillment
2) Collaborating across all functions and firms along the fulfillment stream.
Taichi Ohno says “All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point at which we collect the cash. And we are reducing the timeline by reducing the non-value-adding wastes.” Boart Longyear did exactly this: within four months, the company cut its lead time from 138 days to 12 days by using THIS workbook, rethinking its supply chain starting at the customer and working backwards, and systematically eliminating waste and inventory from the process so that only value remained.
“At LEI we have long felt the need to remedy instability in information and order flow to create smoothly flowing streams of products from suppliers to customers. But until we found Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe, we did not have authors who could combine a proven approach to this challenge with an understandable process.”
– Dr. Jim Womack, Lean Enterprise Institute