In the global marketplace, no business is a self-contained island. No matter how effective your internal material movement, to be a future-thinking business, you must go to the next step and develop long-term supplier partnerships built on a dedication to continuous improvement and the basic concepts of Lean implementation.

Lean Supplier Development: Establishing Partnerships and True Costs Throughout the Supply Chain provides step-by-step instruction on how to build partnerships of mutual improvement and success through supplier development. Offering the same advice that they have successfully applied to corporations across the globe, award-winning consultants Chris Harris, Rick Harris, and Chuck Streeter —

• Provide criteria on how to choose suppliers that will make good long-term partnerships
• Demonstrate proven methods for employing Plan for Every Part (PFEP) to link your facility to the supply base
• Present a true cost model that eliminates guesswork when choosing suppliers to develop
• Show how to develop and maintain efficient information flow all along your supply chain
• Use real-world examples to cover likely contingencies
• Provide a sample quarterly supplier review that you can adapt for your own use

Lean is a journey, not a destination. It requires flexible leaders at the helm who can readily adjust to ever-changing conditions and it requires like-minded partners all along the supply chain. Finding and developing these partners is not about good fortune, it is all about an uncompromising approach to continuous improvement and the application of systematic methods that will build working partnerships that broaden your definition of what is possible