Welcome to the Septembert 2008 edition of our monthly newsletter, Learning to Lean. In this month's edition, we focus on applying lean to the entire supply chain.

Announcements

Below is our remaining 2008 schedule of lean workshops. All sessions will take place at the Doubletree Club Hotel Orange County Airport in Santa Ana, CA.

Course	Date
Kaizen Events: 5S, Visual Controls, and Mistake Proofing	Sep 10, 2008- SOLD OUT
Quick Changeover and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)	Sep 11, 2008
Creating Continuous Flow Manufacturing Cells	Oct 15, 2008
Material Flow and Kanban	Oct 16, 2008
Lean Production Control and Inventory Mgmt.	Nov 12, 2008

Any of the above courses (plus many others) can be brought to your facility and customized to meet your requirements.

Click here for details on all of our training offerings, both on-site at your facility and public.

Lean Supply Chain

The principles of lean apply to every part of a business, and the supply chain presents a unique opportunity for cost and inventory reduction, quality improvement, and lead-time reduction. Given the current state of the economy with rising raw material costs, most companies are trying to reduce cost with little view toward the long-term. Unfortunately, this results in short-term savings at the expense of sustained, long-term profitability.

In this issue, we feature three articles that should help you understand more about lean supply chain. Firstly, we talk about the seven wastes as they apply to the supply chain. In our second article, we talk about key metrics for the supply chain. Our third article talks about supplier relationships in a lean supply chain.

The materials referenced in this newsletter will teach you more about lean. If you would like to learn more, feel free to call us at 866-559-5598 or visit our website and click on "Contact Us."

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EMS Consulting Group, Inc. - 7040 Avenida Encinas, Suite 104-189 - Carlsbad, CA 92011