The Lean Workforce

Ever since the industrial revolution supplanted individual craftsmen as the means to get products to consumers, there has been a continual quest to drive time and cost out of the production and delivery process, what we now call the supply chain. This quest is often expressed colloquially as "better, cheaper, faster."

The path to "better, cheaper, faster" has always been paved with improvements in technology, process, or a combination of the two. Steam-powered machines launched the industrial revolution; Henry Ford's assembly line process enabled mass production; and the computer made information and workflow an integral part of supply chain improvement initiatives, to name just a few examples.

But "better, cheaper, faster" is associated with the traditional "push" model for supply chain improvement. Today, the consumer is king. The Internet has become the ultimate vehicle for immediate gratification, helping to replace the "push" model with a consumer-driven "pull" model more aptly expressed as "perfect, free, now." While this consumer wish list may not be truly attainable, clearly those companies that can come closest to this ideal will be the winners in the highly competitive global marketplace. The question is – how do we transform supply chain operations to capitalize on the pull model?