Written by business leaders for business leaders, “Fix Your Supply Chain: How to Create a Sustainable Lean Improvement Roadmap” explores successful supply chain improvement requirements and improvement methodologies, along with their strengths and limitations. It covers the use of these techniques in a story about Twin City Manufacturing, a fictitious company based on the authors’ actual experiences. The principles put forth in this volume show how to enable and sustain long-term change.
Whether a person is intimately familiar with the supply chain discipline or has limited experience, the authors provide a valuable roadmap that can be applied to supply chain improvement. Drawing from their combined 70 years of experience with supply chain-related functions, they explore seven factors that can help a company become one of the few that truly achieve and maintain operational excellence.
1. Top company leadership
2. Improvement methodology
3. Continuous improvement strategy
4. The cause and the vision
5. The Sustainable Improvement Roadmap
6. Enablement of sustainability
7. Constancy of purpose
Operational excellence is required to make any winning business strategy sustainable, but it is only achieved and sustained through continuous improvement, and these improvements must be real. This book provides the knowledge and methods necessary to identify needed change and the tools to implement them, and perhaps most importantly, provides the confidence needed to become an effective change agent.
About the authors
Paul C. Husby completed a 38-year career with 3M including executive management positions as the managing director of 3M Brazil, division vice president of the Abrasives Division and corporate staff vice president of manufacturing and supply chain services. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Stout with a bachelor of science degree in industrial technology. Paul’s career included a significant number of operational leadership assignments in manufacturing, engineering and supply chain prior to the executive leadership assignments. He spent 12 years in international assignments including Belgium, the United Kingdom and Brazil and he speaks Portuguese as second language. Currently a supply chain consultant with a passion for lean manufacturing, He is also involved with Hope Unlimited of Brazil as a member of the International Advisory Board. Hope is a non-profit organization that rescues and transforms the lives of Brazilian street children.
Dan Swartwood is director of process and supply chain design for Satellite Logistics Group of Houston, Texas. Previously, Dan worked as director of Value Chain Center of Excellence for PRAGMATEK Consulting Group. In this role, he assisted clients in industries such as aerospace and defense, pharmaceutical, medical, industrial, automotive, chemical, and high-tech to analyze their supply chains and identify competitive performance gaps and improvement opportunities. The first 25 years of his career he held a wide range of management positions for 3M Company and Imation Enterprises developing his Six Sigma and lean skills. He is a certified SCOR instructor with the Supply Chain Council, certified CPIM thru APICS, an ASQ certified Quality Engineer. Dan has held many roles within the Supply Chain Council including board of directors, chairman of the Technical Development Steering Committee, International Society of Six Sigma Professionals and the Dean’s Advisory Council member at Arizona State University – West.