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Focus on LAI
Plenary
New
Toolset Aims to Transform Prime-Supplier Relationships
An enterprise can
only be as lean as its suppliers, say Lean Aerospace Initiative leaders.
So a key challenge to industry-wide change is restructuring the connections
between prime contractors and their suppliers into a more collaborative
set of relationships. A new LAI Supplier Networks Transformation Toolset,
announced March 22, defines a guide to plan, practice, and assess this
mutually beneficial transformation.
"The toolset
highlights the importance of managing relationships between primes and
their major suppliers, as well as between major suppliers and lower-tier
suppliers," said Kirk Bozdogan, LAI lead of the toolset team and
CTPID principal research associate.
"It asks primes
to take a systems view of their supplier networks and focus on cooperatively
creating a win-win environment. Lean practices strongly argue for designing
the supplier network architecture to ensure efficient value creation and
developing closely-knit supplier relationships while balancing cooperation
and competition. In addition, they call for early integration of suppliers
into design and development, synchronizing flow, evolving flexibility
and responsiveness, fostering innovation and knowledge integration, and
pursuing continuous improvement throughout the network. A driving idea
is to seek network-wide system optimization, not local optimization."
The first two pieces
of the toolset, the Roadmap Tool and the Supplier Management Self-Assessment
Tool, provide an integrated framework to help aerospace companies evolve
their supplier networks into lean enterprises and a user-friendly Excel
program to check progress. Two more products, a Desk Reference featuring
key concepts, principles, and references and a Resource Guide focusing
on lean basics and resources for smaller suppliers, are due out this summer.
A lean approach to
supply chain management is critical since as much as 70 percent of the
total initial cost of aerospace systems is derived from supplies, materials,
parts, subsystems, and components that are provided by suppliers to systems
integrators. To develop affordable and high-quality aerospace systems
and to reduce time-to-market substantially, companies need to make the
entire network more efficient.
Bozdogan said the
toolset benefits primes and suppliers by making expectations clear throughout
the value chain, educating companies new to lean principles, and prompting
each participant to push to deliver best value.
The toolset is
available to the public on the LAI web
site.
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