Lean is still misunderstood by many. While large groups use Lean largely as a toolbox, others will consider it as a change philosophy. Both views unfortunately do not do justice to the Lean concept. The group that supports Lean as a change philosophy justly refers to the unexpected forces that it can release on the shop floor. Now I will be the...
‘Logistics is logical thinking’ is a statement that I often hear. Tempted to agree, I start to wonder that if this is true, how can it be that I am so often confronted with very different solutions to very similar problems. Could it be that logistics is not as logical as we often seem to think? In case of increasing lead times, one logistics...
When asking a financial director what he thinks the cost of inventory is, he will undoubtedly give an answer like the Return on Capital Employed (ROCE) or the Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC). When asking a logistician the same question, his answer will be the sum of interest, storage space and risk. Unfortunately both are in the wrong,...
Since the eighties we know that customer orders penetrate our company until the Customer Order Decoupling Point (CODP). For the fist time, Hoekstra and Romme made the explicit distinction between production to order and production to stock. With hindsight it seems hard to believe that this was such a big discovery. How difficult can it be? You...