Our LEAN program is at the heart of Operations Excellence. It aims to reduce costs, improve the quality of our services to customers and deliver superior value.
It consists of a number of complementary approaches across our business activities that we apply to all our operations. One of these is the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which focuses on continuous improvement throughout all aspects of life.
LEAN was originally developed by Toyota as a systematic way to identify, analyze and eliminate waste. Starting in 2004, we have learned to apply its guiding principles to logistics and some 2,500 of our supervisors have completed an intensive week-long LEAN training course. By 2010 every supervisor in the company will have done the same. Each of them is now responsible for leading his or her particular operations team in implementing five kaizens a year.
Over the past five years we have developed, tested and implemented LEAN approaches across all our operations: warehousing, cross-dock, line-feeding, transportation and office functions like document processing and call centers. For each one we have developed a standard nine-week approach to get LEAN started at a site. For smaller sites we also deploy a shorter version of the plan.
The nine-week waves are managed by an international team of experts, including representatives from almost every country in which we operate. After each wave results are tracked on a weekly basis and centrally reported on a monthly basis. Follow-up support is delivered by local LEAN experts – who have usually been part of the international team for at least a year.
About a year after the LEAN deployment, the site is revisited and assessed, with further LEAN support based on specific needs.
As a result, every CEVA employee is always looking for ways to improve logistics processes for you and your suppliers, by identifying and eliminating waste, inflexibility and variability in your logistics operations:
- inflexibility – we work with you to better understand your flows, enabling us to adapt our resources accordingly
- variability – we continuously improve process reliability to increase consistency and quality
- waste – we reduce waste by eliminating superfluous processes, giving you lower costs, higher quality and more consistent flows