Euclides Coimbra - Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains

About the Author

Euclides A. Coimbra has over 25 years of experience teaching kaizen and implementing it across a wide variety of business sectors worldwide. He has served in various global leadership roles within the Kaizen Institute since 1998, including Director and CEO of Global Operations and Founder and Managing Director of the Kaizen Institute Iberia.

Mr. Coimbra has strong experience in quality improvement using total quality management (TQM) and especially design of experiments and Taguchi methods. He received firsthand training in Lean flow and pull-system principles at the Kawasaki Heavy Industries motorcycle plant in Japan. Building on this, as well as many successful just-in-time and Toyota Production System implementations in extended supply chains within Europe, he formalized kaizen in logistics and supply chains as a pillar consulting capability of the Kaizen Institute.

Prior to joining the Kaizen Institute, Mr. Coimbra served at Texas Instruments as production engineer in charge of quality improvement projects, as an assistant professor of industrial engineering at the University of Porto (Portugal), and with the Price Waterhouse Manufacturing Consulting Department. He earned a masters degree in industrial engineering from the University of Porto, Faculty of Engineering.

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PART ONE
From Gemba Kaizen to Supply-Chain Excellence

PART TWO
The Dynamics of Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains

PART THREE
How to Implement Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains

PART FOUR
Appendices

Lean has become one of the most popular management methods for enhancing the competitive strength of manufacturing and logistics companies in the past few decades. Because the introduction of Lean involves all levels of management and employs a number of unfamiliar terms such as kanban, takt time, push, jidoka, mizusumashi, and muda, it has not been easy to understand its full implications.

Consequently, Lean has so far been introduced in bits and pieces in many companies and not as a total supply-chain management system. Although the benefits of Lean are gained only when the web of the total flows has been extended throughout all the supply-chain processes, few companies have realized the full benefit of kaizen in logistics and supply chains.

As a result, very few companies so far have succeeded in embracing Lean as a total system across their entire companies.

Euclides Coimbras book, Kaizen in Logistics and Supply Chains, has come at an opportune time, when many companies are going through reexamination of their supply-chain strategies in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the pressures of global competition. Many companies are seeking a road map to enable a quantum leap in improving their supply operations.

Coimbras book will be a perfect guide both to those who wish to embrace Lean for the first time in their factories, warehouses, supply chains, or planning processes and to those who have begun their journey but have enjoyed only marginal success in embracing Lean.

The gist of the book can be captured in the following quotes:

For now, forget about the jargon and the acronyms. We only need to concentrate on making a total flow of materials and information and minimize it.

The information of the flow should come from the customer order and not from a sales forecast.