Leanness, Stock, and Supplier Strain
In the current supply chain management literature, “lean thinking” principles hold that high stock or inventory levels within a process leads to problems. These may be as simple as storage costs, inconvenience, or cash flow problems. However, excess stock can mask many serious problems within an organisation’s supply chain, such as overlong set-up times and bottlenecks. This is demonstrated in the “River and Rocks” analogy: reducing inventory enables management to identify potential problems and address them. Progressive inventory reduction could also be seen as a kaizen principle of continual improvement, since kaizen promotes attainment of efficiency through reductive measures (Schonberger, 1982).
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