Fix Your Supply Chain: How to Create a Sustainable Lean Improvement Roadmap

Written by business leaders for business leaders, this book explores successful supply chain improvement requirements and improvement methodologies, along with their strengths and limitations. It covers the use of these techniques in a story about Twin City Manufacturing, a fictitious company based on the authors’ actual experiences. The principles put forth in this volume show how to enable and sustain long-term change.

Whether you are intimately familiar with the supply chain discipline or have limited experience, the authors provide a valuable roadmap that can be applied to supply chain improvement. Drawing from their combined 70 years of experience with supply chain–related functions, they explore seven factors that can help a company become one of the few that truly achieve and maintain operational excellence.

1. Top company leadership
2. Improvement methodology
3. Continuous improvement strategy
4. The cause and the vision
5. The Sustainable Improvement Roadmap
6. Enablement of sustainability
7. Constancy of purpose

Operational excellence is required to make any winning business strategy sustainable, but it is only achieved and sustained through continuous improvement, and these improvements must be real. This book will arm you with the knowledge and methods needed to identify needed change and the tools to implement them, and perhaps most importantly, give you the confidence needed to become an effective change agent.

Paul Husby is affiliated with the 3M Company in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dan Swartwood is Director of Process and Supply Chain Design for Satellite Logistics Group in Houston, Texas.