Sharing experiences from his own practice, Patrick Andres, head of Spedition Andres, gave a first-hand account of what it needs to bring “Lean” principles to life. To deliver his lecture, he had followed an invitation of the Logistics task force of the chamber of commerce IHK Hanau-Gelnhausen-Schlüchtern to visit the Hanau headquarter of his company.
In a nutshell, “Lean” means improving on quality while reducing cost at the same time. To achieve this, quite a number of related issues have to be addressed. First of all, the alignment of the company with customer expectations has to be focused clearly. Likewise, trust in the capabilities and the willingness of one’s employees is a must.
It starts with a commitment to transparency in all processes – whatever adds no value has to be omitted or at least reduced. An ongoing ‘flow’ of activities to the customer is both goal and benchmark. Surplus production, rejects, waiting times, deficiencies – all these pitfalls should be kept to zero. Transporting semi-finished goods over long distances and transporting material within a warehouse or between several warehouses have to be stopped systematically. Rather than by top-down order, the essential activities and tips should originate from the employees. Their ideas, their recommendations for improvements, their capabilities as well as their chances to learn from each other are most valuable.
‘Lean’ principles only apply if there is a clear focus on the customers’ needs. It is important to look after not only the end customer but everyone in the value chain. Every interaction can be defined as a buyer-seller relationship where mistakes should be the big exemption. Instead of spending a lot of time to find out who was responsible for the last mistake it is much better to realize that mistakes might help initiating any kind of new improvement.
Mistakes certainly happen, but in Spedition Andres, they now happen much less than some years before. Workshops helpedunderstand two items which finally became self-evident in daily work: (1) concentrating 100% on customer-orientation and (2) acknowledging that one improvement only is never enough. Alignment is an ongoing effort – ‘Kaizen’ in Japanese: The (ongoing) change for the better.