How can you align your material handling and storage practices with your overall supply chain strategy?

1 Benefits of alignment

Aligning your material handling and storage practices with your supply chain strategy can bring multiple benefits to your manufacturing process, such as reducing waste and inventory, improving quality and productivity, and enhancing flexibility and responsiveness. Synchronizing your material flow with customer demand can minimize excess or obsolete inventory, as well as the resources needed to store it. Optimizing your material handling and storage systems can ensure that the right materials are available at the right time, place, and condition for production. Moreover, integrating your material handling and storage practices with supply chain partners can increase visibility and collaboration across the value chain, allowing you to adapt to changing customer needs more quickly.

2 Challenges of alignment

Aligning your material handling and storage practices with your supply chain strategy can be challenging due to the complexity and uncertainty of the environment, as well as the need for coordination and communication among stakeholders. Additionally, it may require significant changes in organizational structure, processes, systems, and culture, which may result in resistance or inertia from workers, managers, or customers. To overcome these obstacles, it is necessary to balance the trade-offs between cost, quality, speed, and service while managing demand fluctuations and supply disruptions. Furthermore, it is important to establish clear roles and expectations, share information and feedback in a timely manner, and foster a culture of continuous improvement and learning.

3 Tips for alignment

To align your material handling and storage practices with your supply chain strategy, you need to take a systematic and holistic approach, considering your current situation, desired goals, and available resources. Start by assessing your current state with tools such as value stream mapping, process flow diagrams, or SWOT analysis. Then define your future state using SMART goals, KPIs, or balanced scorecards. After that, develop an action plan with PDCA cycles, project management, or lean principles. Finally, engage your stakeholders with communication plans, training programs, or reward systems. This will ensure that everyone is informed, educated, motivated and recognized in the alignment process.