Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream Review

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(More customer reviews)Book description: what's the key message?
Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream is about introducing lean into your supply chain and logistics networks. A fulfillment stream is defined as all of the activities that move materials and information from suppliers to end customers: planning, sourcing, transporting, manufacturing, inspecting, sorting, packing, and consuming, as well as managing the entire process. The book introduces two concepts for optimizing your fulfillment stream: total cost of fulfillment and collaborations across all functions and firms within the fulfillment stream.
The first half of the book focuses on defining a lean fulfillment stream and measuring the total cost of fulfillment through the process of value stream mapping your supply chain.
The authors list eight guiding principles for designing lean fulfillment streams:
1. Eliminate all the waste in the fulfillment stream so that only value remains.
2. Make customer consumption visible to all members of the fulfillment stream.
3. Reduce lead time.
4. Create level flow.
5. Use pull systems.
6. Increase velocity and reduce variation.
7. Collaborate and use process discipline.
8. Focus on total cost of fulfillment.
Performance of the fulfillment stream can be characterized by perfect-order execution. The execution of a perfect order is characterized by "8 Rights":
Right quantity
Right product
Right place
Right time
Right quality
Right source
Right price
Right service
The second half of the book elaborates on improving your fulfillment stream through collaboration. The fulfillment stream is broken down into six main areas:
Customer collaboration
Outbound logistics
Shipping, receiving, and trailer-year management
Material ordering
Inbound logistics
Supplier collaboration

A disciplined process of daily monitoring is essential to sustain improvements and reduce waste within the fulfillment stream.
How does it contribute to the lean knowledge base?
This book is important because it is a thorough compilation of lean supply chain strategies to minimize the cost of fulfillment. This book describes the critical principles of a lean fulfillment stream and shows how to total cost of fulfillment can be visualized, mapped, and calculated. While the techniques in this book are not new the authors present them in a new way challenging the reader to consider the total fulfillment stream/
What are the highlights? What works?
There are two major strengths of this book. First, the workbook format makes Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream an action guide for companies. The book details an improvement process following the flow from the customer back through the manufacturer to the supplier. Second, the book is supported with over 40 charts and illustrations, including current and future state value stream maps. The authors explain why the data is important and how it differs from traditional measures.
What are the weaknesses? What's missing?
This book is not written for the lean beginner. In order to apply many if not all of the tools and systems recommended to redesign the fulfillment stream one must be familiar with VSM, takt time, flow, pull, kanban, leveling, and PDCA for instance. The authors place a stronger emphasis to reducing the cost of the fulfillment stream instead of maximizing value for the customer.
How should I read this to get the most out of it?
After reading this book to familiarize yourself with the content the power behind it is in trying it. Assemble a team to map your fulfillment stream and calculate the total cost of fulfillment. Then use the steps in this workbook to remove waste in your supply chain. Combining this workbook with other LEI workbooks like Learning to See, Creating Continuous Flow, and Making Materials Flow can be beneficial.


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