Yesterday’s post on vendor managed inventory touched on a couple of things about “lean” and reducing inventory that I’d like to explore further.
All too often “inventory reduction” has been a way to “sell” a lean manufacturing implementation. The reduction of inventory becomes the objective. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it is all to [...]
Almost every shop I have visited has, or is thinking about, initiating a “vendor managed inventory” program of some kind.
The pressure to do this is especially strong when there is a big push to improve working capital positions and increase inventory turns. And, to be honest, the way traditional accounting counts inventory turns, getting the [...]
This post on Kevin Meyer’s Evolving Excellence blog brings up some good challenges to the traditional “avoid fixed costs” rationale for outsourcing. The post (and the comments) point out Wall Street’s obsession with achieving a total variable cost model.
There is certainly a lot of appeal. Traditional cost accounting works hard to “assign” fixed costs to [...]
Do you have a responsibility to make sourcing decisions on anything other than Quality, Delivery, Cost? This
news item about a mass-fatality industrial fire in China opens up some interesting thoughts about sourcing over here.
For future reference after the link dies, the lead of the story is:
A fire at an illegal shoe factory in eastern [...]
In Mike Wroblewski’s blog “Got Boondoggle?” he
comments on just how much packaging and dunnage is not visible in Toyota’s Industrial Equipment plant. Of course that is remarkable because of just how common it is to find the opposite condition. Factories (and offices) have lots of packaging around, and spend lots of time dealing with [...]
This article
NPR : Mattel Recalls More China-Made Toys highlights one of the problems with doing business with an unproven supply chain.
In this case, the OEM in China had specified the correct paint to their supplier – who was a friend of the owner – but the paint supplier had given them less expensive lead [...]