How Much Inventory Do You Really Need? A few years ago, I implemented an SAP? ERP system for a subsidiary of an Australian arms manufacturer. The company was setting up a manufacturing plant in Tucson, AZ. The Iraq war was at its peak. It was mandatory that the company manufacture their product in America, and they needed to ramp up production fast to produce enough to support our forces in Iraq. During a requirements-gathering workshop, the plant manager told me that companies producing similar...

Single Use Replenishment (SUR?): A comprehensive planning solution for recognizing and servicing demand spikes in your supply chain? today! In my earlier blog post, Why are we busy pushing? Pull your plants for a LEANER Supply Chain…Today , I concluded that no one wants to build to forecast, but most of us do exactly that. I also argued that you don?t have to be in a perfect LEAN state to build to customer demand. You can do this in your own environment, starting today. You don?t have to a...

Can You Plan Using ?Push? and Execute Using ?Pull?? LEAN PLANNER? ? A LEAN planning solution to pull any product on any node of your supply chain? today! In an earlier blog post, Why are we busy pushing – Pull your plants for a LEANER supply chain, I concluded that no one wants to build to forecast, but most of us are doing exactly that. I also argued that you don?t have to be in a perfect LEAN state to build to customer demand. You can indeed do this in your present environment starting t...

Seven things you must know before ??implementing an on-demand enterprise solution. After spending over twenty years implementing large scale on-premise ERP systems such as SAP?, I was very excited when the opportunity to implement ARIBA, an on-demand, in-cloud enterprise solution, came my way. Our? customer, a US-based multi-billion dollar consumer goods company specializing in a variety of chicken and turkey products, had engaged us (www.LeanAxis.com) to implement ARIBA for their spend manageme...

Why are we busy pushing? Pull your plants for a LEANER Supply Chain?Today! At one of my supply chain conference meetings I asked the audience if they would prefer to build to forecast and ?push? the product to their customers or wait for customers to ?pull? and then build. To my surprise, not a single person chose the former. Everyone was in favor of building to customer demand. ?So how many of you in fact build to customer demand?? I asked....