1st – Demand Management – Without fail the supply chain suffers from lack of clear, meaningful, and timely consumer and industrial demand information… shipping to releases is not demand… it simply pushes inventory forward. EOQ and similar thinking has caused the glut of inventory as it sits waiting for demand. Now that inventory has been depleted by the massive shutdown of plants across industry, now we are retooling with the same mindless thinking and I fear that lean tools haven’t been adequate to the task in demand management. When tiered-suppliers are ask about the nature of demand their customers experience that drives orders to them they are nearly all clueless. Optimizing supply without improved knowledge and transparency of demand information is folly. Yet we do it without question.

2nd – Product Performance Feedback – I recently attended a working session with a leading design technology provider and suggested that warranty information, failure information, maintenance information, customer satisfaction feedback, et al. needed to make its way back to the design engineer. The company informed me that I was 7 years ahead of industry thinking. What???? Ask Toyota engineering if they think this would have been useful in their accelerators and braking systems! Designing products that create value of the life of the product requires integrated market feedback… yet like demand information, constipation of essential product performance data remains the bane of industry. So now we have plants shut down as demand falls off the map for Toyota because products were designed that severely impacted forecasted demand. But that’s okay… demand wasn’t forecasted and communicated usefully (refer to first point).

We can’t 5S, Six Sigma, or Kaizen event our way out of these fundamental flaws in our supply chain practices… one-piece flow to supply (inventory) waiting for demand just doesn’t appear like progress to me.