Managing Automation - February 2008 - (Page 19) many cases, the processes involved in creating and handing off that information are ill-defined. And, because the information may be consumed by a remote supplier, supply chain back-of fice workers may not readily understand where they and the information they touch fits into the overall business process. Getting supply chain workers to think in terms of identifying and eliminating waste from end-to-end business processes and implementing standard work can be a challenge. “This is a big cultural change for the organization,” says Dan Walsh, another manager in the Intel supply planning organization, who works with Ploudre on lean. “The first thing we have to do is make sure that everybody understands and buys into the need for change and what lean is.” Intel isn’t alone. According to respondents in the Aberdeen lean study, managing “significant cultural change” is, by far, the number one barrier to implementing lean outside of the plant (see chart, p. 21). In light of these cultural challenges, Intel and other manufacturers are beginning their efforts to apply lean principles to the supply chain with extensive education and training. Last summer, Intel started with basic lean overview classes for all supply planning managers, followed by weeklong offsite training. The next step, says Divya Kumar, business One way to deal with complexity is to bite off only a piece of the supply chain at a time. — LeanCor’s Robert Martichenko operations manager in Intel’s Communications Division, will be to document existing supply planning processes, identify areas of waste, create value stream maps of how processes should work, and launch lean projects aimed at implementing the new lean processes. But Intel has run into challenges simply documenting its supply planning processes. Many managers believed the company already had documented those processes as part of the standard package of materials given to new employees. After closer examination of those documents, however, Intel officials realized that many were either incomplete or did not accurately reflect how individual supply planners actually did their jobs. “In fact, people use many different processes based on the different products and services we provide, but we lacked any clearly established baseline of the processes,” Kumar says. “A lot of it was tied up in tribal knowledge, and you can’t measure and improve processes if you haven’t documented them.” Many manufacturing organizations run into problems attempting to document and analyze supply chain processes, experts say. While building value stream maps can be a useful and fairly straightforward process on the contained plant floor, it is much more difficult in the supply chain where processes often span multiple functions, partners, logistics providers, and customers that may be spread around the globe. “As the value chain becomes more complicated, managing value stream maps gets pretty difficult,” says Aamer Rehman, vice president of lean manufacturing solutions at i2 Technologies, a supplier of supply chain management software. One way to deal with that complexity, LeanCor’s Martichenko says, is to bite off only a piece of the supply chain at a time, rather than trying to document and lean out the whole thing at once. “When mapping the supply chain, pick one SKU, one finished product or part,” Martichenko says. “Start with a fairly stable, high-volume, high-frequency-of-use part Intel managers David Ploudre (top left), Dan Walsh (top right), and Divya Kumar map out how they can apply the PDCA cycle, a lean methodology, to various business operations. Photos courtesy: Intel, LeanCor 19 February 2008
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