Expertise

Redpoint is one of the precursors in Lean Supply Chain Management (Lean SCM).The term Lean SCM stands for a new and pragmatic gearing of Lean-principles, organizational development and state-of-the-art IT with the aim to sustainably increase the company’s efficiency and to drive the value-added process with minimal employment of resources. The Lean-approach is questioning and by doing so changing existing structures. SCM is aiming at the optimal operation of existing or reorganized structures. A suitable combination of those two approaches will result into a strong lever for EBIT margin improvements and profitable growth.

So why wasn’t the Lean-hype in the 1990ies resulting in the expected success for many companies? On one hand, the leading idea to generate value while avoiding waste was not truly implemented. The required and sustainable change of processes and organizational structures usually has not taken place. At the same time, Lean-methods have been applied in a wrong or too dogmatic way and could not generate the expected effects.

On the other hand, most industry enterprises by far have not exhausted their SCM optimization potential. Often, SCM was misunderstood as a mere matter of software. Applied systems alone, however, do not cause significant improvement. Moreover, the mostly cost-optimizing-oriented SCM concepts of the past did not succeed in generating sustainable competitive advantage.

Lean SCM as a holistic management concept intents to achieve significant performance increases by an intensified collaboration and better coordination of value-adding processes. For instance, better coordination could be the usage of simple pull-principles to accelerate the flow of materials and the significant reduction of lot-sizes. For complex products, low and erratic consumption figures or customized make-to-order parts, usually Advanced Planning Systems (APS) have to be used as IT-platform for the Supply Chain Management. Many companies do not succeed in developing their optimal mix of methods based on their corporate strategy and to align organization, software and change management. Redpoint bridges the gap between strategy, processes, human behavior and information technology, thus enabling mercurial performance improvement.