The appearance in the western world of advanced agreements between Customers and Suppliers is changing the perspective of Make or Buy Strategies. In this article, after a short introduction of the three alternatives of pure Market, Vertical Integration and Partnership, … Continue reading →

Too often the Toyota approach is confused with the tools that characterize the lean production system, losing sight of the way of thinking that inspired it. It’s reasonable to believe that this deficit of attention can explain the limited success … Continue reading →

There are many different ways to improve efficiency and effectiveness in a Distribution Center, what you need is a system oriented approach and a good amount of data for a useful exploitation WCL_L&M

Nearly every company, in many Business to Business industries, is firmly persuaded to know what produces value for its customer, nonetheless the market is continuously looking for alternative sources and the hypothesis of a partnership with the suppliers, so often … Continue reading →

Every manufacturing process has one main objective: to create a continuous flow pulled by the customer. As well known, on contrast, we witness to a well rooted bias: to replenish stock by producing batches of finished or semi-finished goods. One … Continue reading →

One of the aspects of the oriental approach to operations management concerns plants and equipments maintenance. As for any other lean thinking perspective, also in this case one can reduce every innovative content simply to a series of tools and … Continue reading →

After so many lean projects, in the western world the satisfaction of the results obtained is below par, the efforts of the transformation are often much higher than what was foreseen and the Board is asking if there is a … Continue reading →

What remains of the credit crunch and the need to develop an offer more and more innovative and consistent with continuously changing customers’ requests, stress reactive capacities of small and medium sized companies. The business case contained in this article … Continue reading →

Big global companies that applied successfully the lean production techniques, are now exporting the lessons learned on their suppliers in order to exploit flexibility and reduce non value added activities in their overall supply chain network. In the automobile industry … Continue reading →

The crisis started in 2009 in Italy in nearly every manufacturing realm, shows a weakness which, in those years, has never found a structural and organic solution: the competitive edge based on an permanent research of productivity. This business case … Continue reading →