Do you want to be at the end of a Fulfillment Stream or a Supply Chain?

Robert Martichenko, co-author of Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream was the guest on the Business901 Podcast. Robert is CEO and Founder of LeanCor, the only Third Party Logistics provider (3PL) wholly dedicated to the application of lean principles throughout the supply chain’s functions. Building on 15+ years of experience, Robert Martichenko created LeanCor to drive the next step in the evolution of lean by addressing the unmet logistics needs of Lean Manufacturers, Distributors, and Retailers.

This book follows the Lean Workbook format popularized by the publisher, Lean Enterprise Institute.

LeanCor designs, implements and manages lean supply chain and logistics networks for any size company. Their three service categories are designed to support companies in their effort to eliminate organizational waste, drive down cost, and increase global competitive advantage.focus on developing solutions with our customer base which requires operational flexibility to go where you need us to go. The solution dictates the geography and they go where it is necessary to implement the right solution, at the right time, in the right place and at the right cost.

Robert’s latest book, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream builds on the concepts of waste, flow, and pull. This workbook provides the steps to a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers. Even though I am not an active participant in the supply chain field, I found great value in the book and the principles that it outlined. during the podcast, Robert did a masterful job of explaining many of these principles. At the upcoming Lean Logistics Summit, June 22nd and 23rd in Cincinnati, OH, Robert leads off the event as the keynote speaker.

An excerpt from Chapter 1 of the book explaining the difference between Lean Fulfillment versus the Supply Chain:

Businesses have traditionally referred to the progression of materials from suppliers to end customers as the “supply chain.” But a chain suggests something heavy and inflexible, prone to kinking and jamming. It’s static rather than dynamic. Within a chain it’s easy for managers to lose sight of the flow of value from start to finish. Instead they focus on optimizing the one link they control, whether it’s a process, a department, or even an entire firm.

To capture the lean concept of smooth flow, we find it helpful to envision a steadily advancing stream of materials and the firms and facilities involved as tributaries joining their efforts to serve the customer. We call this flow of parts and finished products a fulfillment stream. It includes all of the activities that move materials and information from suppliers to end customers: planning, sourcing, transporting, manufacturing, inspecting, storing, packing, and consuming, as well as managing the entire process.

Once managers understand that they are involved in a fulfillment stream, we find that they can identify the obstacles preventing the stream from flowing smoothly and swiftly. But because no single manager or firm controls the entire stream, new forms of collaboration are necessary to reduce the total cost of the stream while improving its responsiveness to customer needs. To understand how this can happen we will follow in this workbook the experience of a sample company as it learns to focus on its end-to-end fulfillment stream to make it lean.