Supply chain design of an electronic industry using lean principles

The supply chain of a section of an Indian electronic industry has been analysed and designed integrating suppliers, manufacturers, distributors and customers using lean principles. The models have been developed both at the strategic and operational level and integrated to achieve overall optimisation instead of individual echelon optimisation. The model solution gives the optimum values of various cost components per product. The dominant cost components have been targeted for reduction using lean principles viz. Time compression approach in production cycle and JIT approach in raw material procurement cycle. Finally, it is observed that the implementation of lean principles reduces per product costs considerably.