Lean Supply Chains

THURSDAY 2nd FEBRUARY
“Lean and Responsive Supply Chains – the key to competing in Asia and with Asia: Lessons from Dan Jones and Jim Womack’s new book Lean Solutions."

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Location: London School of Economics, Room H102 (Connaught House: entrance on Aldwych, just round the corner towards the City from Kingsway): Nearest tube stations Temple or Holborn
Time: 5.00 - 6.30
This is a free Seminar, but we ask you still to register
Co-organised by: Asia-Pacific Technology Network and the Interdisciplinary Institute of Management, LSE

Chair Louis Turner, Chief Executive, Asia-Pacific Technology Network

Speaker Professor Daniel T. Jones - Chairman, Lean Enterprise Academy, and co-author of The Machine that Changed the World, Lean Thinking and Lean Solutions

Background
There are two sea changes going on in the world economy. The first is the rise of the “low cost” producers in China and the second is the lean revolution which is now gaining momentum. Although the lean revolution began long before the recent rise of China, they go hand in hand. Lean is as essential to Chinese firms seeking to become global as it is to western firms responding to their challenge. All of us will be better off as a result.

The one competitive advantage western manufacturers do have – they are closer to their relatively affluent customers – that is you and me! They ought to better understand their needs and ought to be better at developing just the right new products and services to solve their problems – managing their health, coping with congestion, seamlessly communicating etc. They also ought to be able to get these products and related services into the hands of these customers far more quickly than producers located half way round the globe.

This is our comparative advantage – yet we don’t recognise it - and we are not really exploiting it very well! Manufacturers are far too removed or even insulated from their customers. They seldom interact with the end users of their products and their distributors, whose main role is getting the best price for products already made to forecast, have in many cases lost contact with customers as they outsourced customer service.

Most manufacturers are still struggling with a throughput time of weeks and a distribution pipeline of many months. They have also saddled themselves with a supply chain that stretches right across the world, with the same delays as their Chinese competitors. This is not going to be sustainable in the future and all that wasted time and effort costs far too much and undermines the competitive advantage from being more responsive to local customers. The benchmark is an equivalent product made in China, shipped through several distribution points and flown to the UK in an Airbus A380. Why companies beat that?

Professor Daniel T. Jones - Chairman, Lean Enterprise Academy,
The main thrust of Professor Jones’s work has been to develop and help to implement the Lean Business System. Based on Lean Thinking principles learnt from Toyota, this starts by defining customer value, which then leads to the reorganisation of every step required to design, order, build, deliver and maintain this value across all the organisations involved. As a result firms can do more with less, respond more quickly to customer needs, create more rewarding jobs for employees and reduce their impact on the environment. The results of Lean Thinking can now be seen in every sector and across the globe.

Professor Jones and Dr. James P Womack began collaborating on the research that led to Lean Thinking as directors of two major global research programmes led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA. They co-authored the resulting books, The Future of the Automobile (1984) and The Machine that Changed the World (1990). The latter was chosen as the Best Business Book of 1990 by the Financial Times and has sold 400,000 copies in 11 languages.

Further research with Dr. Womack led to two articles in the Harvard Business Review (1994 & 1996) and the book Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Value in your Corporation in 1996. Now in its second, expanded edition, it has sold over 300,000 copies in 10 languages. It led to Lean Summits being held in the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Brazil, South Africa, India, Turkey and Poland. Professor Jones and Dr. Womack have established a global network of non-profit institutes dedicated to researching, educating and publishing action-oriented knowledge on the Lean Business System, starting with the Lean Enterprise Institute in the USA and the Lean Enterprise Academy in the UK - www.leanuk.org. In 2001 they co-authored a workbook on rethinking supply chains called Seeing the Whole.

After a research career at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research in London and the Sussex European Research Centre and Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University he is was appointed Professor of Manufacturing Management at Cardiff University Business School in 1989, where he was the founding Director of the Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC) from 1994 to 2001 - www.cf.ac.uk/carbs/lom/lerc. He was also a founding director of the International Car Distribution Programme - www.icdp.net.

As part-time Principal of “Unipart U” he helped establish the first company university in the UK at the Unipart Group of Companies (1993-2001). He has contributed to several UK policy reviews, as a member of the ESRC Research Programmes Board (1994-7), the Rethinking Construction Task Force (1998) - www.dti.gov.uk/construction/rethinkingconstruction, the Foresight Manufacturing 2020 Panel (2000) - www.dti.gov.uk/insight_manufacturing, and the DTI Automotive Innovation and Growth Team (2002) - www.autoindustry.co.uk/companies/aigt. He is also a member of the grocery industry's Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) European Academic Advisory Panel and Editor of the ECR Journal: International Commerce Review - www.ecr-journal.org. He also lectures and advises companies implementing lean thinking across the world