Thank you in advance,

Aynura

Lol…many of us in Lean would take umbrage at your placement of “six sigma” after “Lean”. Lean is an entirely different philosophy. I realize a lot of enterprises don’t want to leave six sigma by the wayside after having invested so heavily in it (I’m not the only one who thinks the green-black belt thing is lame :)) but Lean is a cleaner, older and more holistic philosophy.

There is a book you may find useful, it’s called _A Stitch in Time_ by Abernathy et al. I have it but haven’t read it yet. It’s all about “lean retail”. Personally, I cannot see how the consumption end can be substantively improved without tracking backwards into the supply chain. If you wanted to go vertical, then minimally you’d need to make serious intellectual commitments (and more, of course) to get into our end of the business.

(I’m looking for warehouse / reditribution centers).

My co blogger Miracle has written quite extensively on this topic. Use the search box on this site with the key words “distribution”, “fulfillment” and “product identification”.

I read that Tesco cut throughput time from 20 days to 5? Is that correct? Is this a one off example or can you provide other retail companies that have reduced throughput time by half (who are these guys???).

I’m out of my element in these matters. I don’t know much about retail, much less lean retail. Coming from the back end, I have a hard time seeing how retailers can go lean -really- without backtracking and helping their suppliers go lean too. Anything else is only lip service; flogging suppliers -who must in effect, warehouse excess inventory to supply retail on demand, which is definitely NOT lean- to prop up the front end of the business. There is no other way. I’d suggest reading _Lean Thinking_ for a discussion of what Lean is as opposed to the darling distortions promulgated by glee (and greed) of the potentiality of increased margins ;).

I read that Tesco cut throughput time from 20 days to 5? Is that correct?

Is this a one off example or can you provide other retail companies that have reduced throughput time by half (who are these guys???).

Thanks,
Bill

Knowing what I know about small US based contractors and retail store preparation (SKUs, tagging, entering in POS systems), that would be a tough task to manage here in the US, I can only imagine it would be tougher in other small sewing contractor shops where they are producing product for different parts of the world.

In a perfect world, it would be a great value added service if contractors could offer such features, but considering how antiquated most are, with respect to computer and retail technology, it seems far fetched.

When you have a domestic industry built entirely upon the task of taking garments from a contractor and getting them ready for retail, you start to realize that could be a huge undertaking.

I’m just wondering how you could make that work. It would be a flawless system if you could, but it seems logistically easier to just have one central location for distribution.