Achieving Lean Supply Chain. Management Assignment

How to Achieve a Lean Supply Chain
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How to Achieve a Lean Supply Chain
Lean philosophy has significantly transformed how businesses are managed and operated in the digital era. Indeed, it encourages continuous improvement of workflow since it emphasizes treating people with respect. The primary principles of lean philosophy are identifying the value, mapping a value stream, creating workflow, applying a pull-based system, and striving for perfection (Do, 2017). The paper focuses on how the five principles or primary components of lean philosophy can improve the customers shopping experience in a supermarket.


Figure 1: Principles of Lean Philosophy.
Shopping at the retail store or supermarket is a common activity to almost everyone. When a person visits the supermarket, one expects to get all products conveniently placed on the shelves. In particular, the first component of lean is defining customer value (Do, 2017). At this point, manufacturers must understand consumers’ requirements well so that they can come up with products that satisfy their needs. Supermarkets can improve the shopping experience by ensuring that they provide commodities and services that customers want. Some of the things they can do to understand what their clients are looking for are observing, interviewing, web analytics, and gathering demographic information to understand different clients.
The second component of lean philosophy is mapping and identifying the value stream. At this juncture, the primary objective is using the consumer value identified in the first step as the reference point. All tasks that add no value to the customer’s needs are put aside. This component is crucial in identifying and eradicating unnecessary business processes that might inconvenience clients when they visit the supermarket. For example, products should be placed on the shelves with their prices indicated appropriately.
The third lean principle is creating the workflow. When all the waste is removed from a value stream, the shopping service should operate well without delays or interruptions. Some of the things that can be done to improve the workflow in a supermarket are levelling ...