SDI embraces Lean Six Sigma (LSS) not only for its own mission, but also as a framework for helping our customers dominate their industries. As maintenance, repair, and operations logistics evolve from cost center to potential source of strategic advantage, the benefits of LSS become magnified. SDI harnesses these concepts – faster, less wasteful, more consistent supply chain practices – to fully integrate MRO throughout the value stream.
Voice of the Customer
When you engage SDI we begin the journey to optimal MRO supply chain operations by gaining a true understanding of your company, its goals, and the obstacles keeping you from achieving them. This first step is critical. Like treating a personal malady, curing your company of inefficiency hinges on a proper diagnosis. Only by comprehending your wants and needs can we devise the proper course of action. This intelligence-gathering phase includes hand-picking your team members to include all stakeholders, establishing the project charter, and determining the costs and benefits of achieving your goals.
By fully grasping how your firm determines when to place orders for MRO materials, how it chooses suppliers, where it stores spare parts and consumables, how it pays for them, and every other aspect of your procurement and order-fulfillment routine, SDI can begin exploring ways to customize your process to conform to the tenets of Lean Six Sigma:
- Perfecting Fulfillment
- Reducing Waste
- Eliminating Errors
- Capitalizing on Opportunities
Perfecting Fulfillment
SDI measures our clients’ order fulfillment procedure against Six Sigma’s DMAIC metric, often uncovering ways to speed up service and cycle times. Our engineers’ reviews can uncover the need and method for integrating systems and automating picking, transportation, and verification tasks. Our expertise translates to better-performing delivery of MRO resources. Getting the right replacement parts where they need to be, when they need to be there, and ready for installation is the ultimate goal of this analysis. It allows SDI to implement the tools that best fit your specific situation: just-in-time delivery, demand/supply synchronization, value stream mapping, and more.
Reducing Waste
SDI applies the key Lean concept of waste reduction to virtually every link in our clients’ supply chain, by streamlining essential operations and eliminating non-essential ones. Our process designers commonly find ways to trim fatty carrying costs owing to:
- over-procurement
- inefficient tracking
- off-contract ordering
- hoarding
- and more
They stop time-wasting materials processing, staging, and other movement en route to its point of use. They help automate processes, freeing labor and management resources for more efficient use. They design and force adherence to sourcing, warehousing, distribution, and other routines that establish consistency and eradicate wasteful variance.
Eliminating Errors
Inefficiencies due to human error, managerial inconsistencies, system bypasses, etc. can creep up even when a company establishes workable processes of ordering, managing, and using MRO supplies. SDI incorporates the Lean concept of “poka yoke,” or mistake-proofing process to ensure every operation is performed as prescribed – every time. For instance, SDI’s experts may design mechanisms that force warehouse workers to kit out commonly used parts and maintenance engineers to file documentation.
Capitalizing on Opportunities
A lean, mean MRO supply chain machine gives manufacturing, processing, and other firms the agility it needs to respond to demand changes, supplier contingencies, new businesses opportunities, and other market challenges and opportunities. This flexibility requires accommodating the sometimes-conflicting goals of the maintenance and procurement departments. SDI is experienced in bringing these stakeholders together, establishing procedures such as data cleansing, taxonomy uniformity, etc., that benefit both while cutting costs and improving productivity. ZEUS, our proprietary master data management platform, helps clients take advantage of purchase opportunities through powerful product search, categorical product systemization, web-based information collecting and analysis, and more.
Contact SDI Today
SDI views manufacturing productivity through the Lean Six Sigma lens of waste reduction, and process efficiency. We practice what we preach, working to integrate our own supply chain processes the same way we implement LSS doctrines into our clients’ MRO operations. To see how SDI can help your company be more production through LSS, contact our experts today.
