subject: Lean Manufacturing Should Be A Joint Effort Between Suppliers And Manufacturers [print this page] Although it sounds new to a lot of people, successful businesses have been doing it for a long time. In fact, since the beginning of modern manufacturing at the beginning of last century, lean manufacturing has been the preferrred for corporations that want to control their market.
Henry Ford was one of the first to put down on paper in his writings that manufacturing needs to be a combined effort between suppliers and manufacturers. Meaning that the two need to work together for just in time delivery so that the supplier has a constant stream of orders to deliver and the manufacturer will not have a warehouse of supplies for things that they will not even build until the next quarter or the next year.
It is a waste of money to store all of that material, but it's what companies needed to do in the past. They were always fearful that they were going to run out of material because the manufacturer and supplier did not have a relationship powerful enough to guarantee timely delivery and a system in place to keep the orders delivering on a mutual schedule. The manufacturer has to do a good and accurate job of forecasting what they need and when they are going to need it.
Then the manufacturer and the supplier come together with a plan to deliver the product when it's needed. That way the manufacturer can spend time making parts for other consumers and the manufacturer doesn't have to tie up abundant resources stocking large amounts of material that they will only be storing until it's needed down the road. It's working together to make everybodys job more productive and building strong relationships with the people that are supposed to be working to mutually benefit each other. If your organization is in the business of beating down its suppliers then eventually, when you run through the multiple distributors and burn all of your bridges then you will have nobody to purchase your products from.
At that point, if you happen to be into treating business acquaintances and partners in such a way, you are probably struggling to just stay in business. When you treat people, and this goes for anything really, not just business, like they are partners, then you are more likely to get positive responses and more favorable outcomes. People like to feel like they are working with somebody, not necessarily for them.
