Lean Supply Chain Management

Lean Supply Chain Management
Name
Institution Affiliation
In what ways can an organization’s suppliers improve or damage the organization’s Lean Efforts?
Organization’s suppliers can enhance or damage an organization’s lean efforts by improving their response to change features and vice-versa. Suppliers can also support lean efforts by lowering their prices to match those of the organization and enhancing their services quality to the extent that they erase the need to incur extra costs of inspection, manufacturing, transportation, and warehousing. They can also do this by ensuring that they deliver goods and services on time and subscribe to the organizational culture of continuous improvement. Finally, suppliers can enhance lean efforts by curbing inefficiency via the reduction of wastage, overworking people and equipment, and eliminating unevenness in operations (Guo & Xu, 2007). In a similar way, suppliers can also damage an organization’s lean efforts by being slow to respond to client changes, fluctuating prices from time to time, delivering poor quality goods and services, and untimely delivery of products. Why do you feel this occurred and could organizational leadership have resolved these problems early in the process?
The latter scenario that entails damaging the organization’s lean efforts occurs due to many reasons such as the supplier being unable to close the lead time gap, to manage demand effectively, optimize the supply chain operations, reduce wastage, improve their products’ quality, and reduce products’ costs.

For example, Fabrinet, a manufacturer and supplier of high-end electro-chemical parts was faced with challenges of meeting their respective clients’ lean efforts for many years. The company had to address these issues or face the probability of losing its customers to competitors. It is at this point that the CEO of the company, David Mitchell, spearheaded a robust organization shakeup that led to the streamlining of Fabrinet’s operations with those of the customers (White Paper, Lean Manufacturing, n.d.). Thanks to sound organization leadership skills of the CEO, Fabrinet has managed to stay afloat despite the earlier challenges.
References
Guo, Y., & Xu, Z. (2007). A Model of Lean Supplier Management Based on the Lean Production. In Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems II (pp. 717-726). Springer, Boston, MA.
White Paper, Lean Manufacturing. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://fabrinet.com/services/supply-chain/lean-manufacturing-wp