Lean Supply Chain Strategy Research

Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the trend of future management. It emphasizes real -time information, quick response, global strategic partnership, flexibility, low risk, and so on. Lean Supply Chain is planning, executing, and designing across multiple supply chain partners to deliver products of the right design, in the right quantity, at the right place, at the right time. It involves the flows of material, information, and finance in a network consisting of customers, suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors. This paper analyses troubled supply chain conditions, points out some cruxes in the business process operation, clarifies lean strategies in supply chain management and demonstrates feasible solutions aiming at the problems. The structure of the paper is organized as follows.Chapter 1 covers the theme and states my work in this paper. And Chapter 2 introduces the basic theory of supply chain management (SCM). In chapter 3 and 4, I have summarized research literature in this field and analyzed 110 organizations of five major manufacturing sectors and domestic situations insupply chain capability. I have chose five Key Supply Chain Metrics--flexibility, integration, cooperation, simplicity and stability to measure their overall performance. The conclusion demonstrates that their operational capability ranges in 4 levels: Functional Focus; Internal Integration; External Integration and Cross- Enterprise Collaboration.The most fundamental measure of customer satisfaction is the frequency with which companies can meet request dates. This measure shows how well a supply chain is configured to meet customer expectations, which is a key indicator of agility. Compared to regular bullwhip effect, Chapter 5 deduces bullwhip effect in delivery schedule, which arises when downstream sites of the supply chain couldn't share with upstream sites supply information of delivery time. To implement simple and reportable delivery performance in their ERP, Irationally transform PERT method to compute delivery schedule and forecast secure inventory level precisely. This gives the downstream partners a clear picture of the supply conditions of upstream suppliers, preventing delay of individual supplier diffusing to the whole chain.To solve real problem aiming at real environment, I have chosen a pint-sized supply chain composed of two sticking points as my research samples, investigating two companies to find out the crux in their actual supply chain operation. Chapter 6 and 7 state effective solutions of lean supply chain strategy basing on these practical surveys.The key to lean supply chain is information flow. Achieving logistics efficiency requires accurate and timely information. Advances in information system technology have had a huge impact on the evolution of supply chain management. It is necessary and possible to set up a new Supply Chain Information Integration System (SCâ…¡S) using the latest information technology. In chapter 8 and 9, I propose a framework of SCâ…¡S under environment of Internet and Intranet. Using SCâ…¡S I expect to achieve visibility, architecture and total involvement. Namely, visibility presumes that all the players in the supply chain shall be capable of reacting to each other. If good architecture and compatibility comes true, the entry of new SCIIS would link to existing enterprise resource planning applications. Total involvement assumes that customers and other links in the chain have to be ready to handle the web-based supply chain technology. Finally , as the conclusive part, Chapter 10 sums up the dissertation, proposing the future task in such a promising field.