KAIZEN APPROACH TO SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: FIRST STEP FOR TRANSFORMING SUPPLY CHAIN INTO LEAN SUPPLY CHAIN

This paper provides evidence on how the use of Lean management approaches and one-day Kaizen workshop can help to discover root-causes of problems appearing in the supply chain, particularly in this paper focusing on late delivery. In addition, the well-known Quality concepts such as Ishikawa diagram and 5xWhy may enrich the Lean Management as applied to the supply chain. Also, this paper shows that problems in the supply chain are sometimes caused by company's internal procedures and its internal inefficiency. A case study from suspension and joining equipment factory in Croatia was used to support the research. At the end a simple solution for the discussed problem was proposed.