Under the globalisation and very integrated relation ship between individual companies in amost all industries, more and more companies adopted new business models which focus on their core competitiveness, while outsource the less important operations and services to third parties. In manufacturing, this means that companies are changing themselves from single plants into domestic and international contract manufacturer. Under such circumstance, sourcing from suppliers from all over the world can be regularly seen in these days. As the consequence of which, the supply chain has lengthened and grown more complex (Vitasek, Manrodt, Abbott, 2005). Thus, supply chain in nowadays are facing even more challenges ever. To be more …show more content…
Thus, as the combination of lean approach and supply chain management, lean supply chain management has been carried out as a new concept for today’s new business models. In order to introduce the lean supply chain management and it’s long-term benefits, this article has been divide into six sections. After this introduction, second section provides an introduction of lean supply chain and the relationship between lean approach and supply chain management. Third section presents the drivers of lean supply chain approach. Fourth section discusses the actual benefit of using lean supply chain management by using examples of today’s big firms. Fifth section focuses on the practicability of lean supply chain management in economic downturn situation, followed by some conclusion in the sixth …show more content…
The concept of “lean” was first introduced by Toyota as “lean manufacturing” in Toyota Production System (TPS). According to Schniederjans (2010), the four main principles of lean are: eliminating waste ( the waste form inventory, overproduction, production defects and waste of motion, processing, transportation and waiting time), improving quality, increasing product flow and reducing cost.
Now, plenty of companies worldwide adopted lean management and this has enabled them to improve their competitiveness (Moyano-Fuentes and Sacristán-Díaz, 2012. Depending the application, lean can bring out different levels of benefits. For example, when lean is applied to individual processes, department, it can bring short-term efficiency improvement, while when lean principles are continuously applied for managing an entire organization or entire flow of an industry, lean can bring out long-term benefits and world-class performance (Schniederjans, Schniederjans and Schniederjans, 2010). But, in order to applied to entire flows of product or industry, “lean” need something to gather all the companies in one supply chain to work together. In other words, lean approach requires supply chain management to reflect it’s full benefits in long-term and bigger range of management. For example, in order to achieve increased product flow (one