Lean Supply Chain Management Essentials

XIII

Introduction

e idea for this book came over dinner in St. Louis one night. Brian lives in St.

Louis, and Bill was working for a client there. We have known each other since we

were young men, when we both worked for a productivity consulting firm and were

assigned to several projects together. We had vaguely kept in touch over the years,

so the St. Louis project was a welcome chance to catch up on things. On that night,

Bill was doing a typical diatribe on how the supply chain needed to be approached

much differently when adopting Lean, and Brian was bemoaning the dearth of help-

ful examples of key parts of Lean and clear explanations of the same. We decided that

we should put some words where our mouths were, and agreed that we should wr ...