Blook, sweat & tears

The calls for lean thinking have become the mantra for improving productivity amongst manufacturers. But to meet customer requirement, manufacturers are discovering that being lean is not enough, being agile is needed as well. In this paper, the common characteristics of an agile supply chain are discussed. They are market sensitive - very close to the market and can read what is going almost in real-time. They are also network based, using specialist providers of specific services - not trying to do everything within there own operation. They share information - they are virtual in that sense and they have highly aligned processes meaning they connect together very well with things like vendor managed inventory.