Burman Associates—supply chain management

LOGISTICS...

Production logistics

Construction industry logistics

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Administrative, financial & design services

Burman’s past assignments in offices shows that there are very few occupations indeed where attention to logistics will not produce benefits. Courses in time management have certainly improved the present day manager’s personal performance compared with those of earlier times, but managing personal time is only a small proportion of producing first class processes. value stream analysis and time compression have a considerable contribution to make in improving customer service, reducing waste, speeding up information flow and avoiding delays and duplication of process. Once again, benchmarking has a useful place in assisting improvement and motivating staff to act.

In product design and development, operating procedures are frequently driven by misconceptions. Hal Mather draws a pretty parallel with unloading ships. He proposes three identical docks and three identical ships with identical loads to be unloaded. There are three mobile unloading cranes. One crane can unload one ship in one day. Intuitively, managers allocate each ship a dock and a crane. The result is three ship/days spent unloading. However, if all three cranes are allocated to one ship at a time, the first ship is freed in one third of a day, the second in two thirds of a day and the third in one day. Hence total ship/days of delay is reduced to two days, a 50% improvement. Mather compares this with practice in design offices, where resource is spread thinly, and everything takes a long time.

Grossly oversimplified as all the above may be, there is usually plenty of mileage in investigating the logistics of design and development. By applying Time Compression, Rolls Royce reduced the the time to develop a new aero engine by 40%.

Returning to the erstwhile Chairman of Sony, who said his job was ‘to make our products obsolete before the competition do’ the competitive importance of logistics to design and development cannot be over-emphasised.

Burman Associates is a member of the European Logistics Consortium Ltd.