Retail
The application of lean principles in a Retail environment should be a marriage made in heaven. After all, it was the observation of the principles of replenishment (for example Pull Systems and Kanban) and workplace organisation (5S) in US Supermarkets that gave many of the early Japanese adopters of lean the inspiration to apply those same principles in their manufacturing operations.
However, it often doesn’t feel like a happy marriage. In our experience many Retail organisations have failed to fulfil the true potential of lean deployment in their organisations, particularly when one investigates the ‘back-room’ support operations that support and service the ‘front of house’. These environments are often chaotic and lack smoothly flowing operations. Customer demand is not well understood, and systems are reactive – resulting in a ‘fire-fighting’ mentality.
A vital tool that we have used successfully in a Retail environment is the Voice of the Customer analysis (using the Kano Model, for example). Understanding the things that customers truly value, making the experience of shopping as effortless as possible, are both desirable in building customer loyalty and increased revenues.
Of course, Retail operations are only as good as their Supply Chains, so we work closely with organisations to understand how well synchronised the whole chain is to meet true customer demand, and investigate and challenge the paradigms of ‘batching’ that often lead to large increases in demand at Suppliers