Supply Chain Management Workshop Series: Milk Run Delivery

Nowadays, Supply Chain Management becomes a concern of many companies to success their improvement as there are several waste coming from these chains. By reducing all waste in these chains, company will get more benefit. These benefits are speed and responsiveness to customers, reducing inventories, reducing costs, improving customer satisfaction, and also Supply Chain as a competitive weapon.
Supply chains that want to grow and continue to improve must adopt lean. Lean is a cooperative process for survival and for success. Lean concepts require an attitude of continuous improvement with a bias for action. A lean supply chain is proactive and plans for the unexpected by positioning all resources for effectiveness. Downturns in demand can be addressed without layoffs or significant productivity losses. A lean supply chain is one that produces just what and how much is needed, when it is needed, and where it is needed.

Gaining visibility into your transportation operations all the way from raw materials vendors to your end customers will open the door for communication, process development, and management skills that can be leveraged in other areas like inventory management and procurement. A bonus is that many of the more advanced supply chain visibility tools gaining rapid acceptance in the marketplace are either part of a suite of applications that combines Warehouse Management System (WMS) and Transportation Management System (TMS) functions or have transportation management and optimization as their base functionality. This acknowledges the fact, that transportation is the critical bond to upstream and downstream links in your supply chain.

Transportation strategy should not drive how and when product is delivered. Rather, customer expectations need to be fully understood, and transportation strategies must be developed to meet these expectations with optimal inventory levels. Transportation strategy and tactics must support Lean inventory strategies. This will undoubtedly change the transportation methods of the organization. For example, a focus on truckload movements and transportation load building based on economies of scale may not support the customer experience. Products are generally not consumed by the truckload or even a skid at a time. Rather, small quantities are often preferred to meet consumption needs. Lean transportation means proactively reviewing transportation modes, matching mode to inventory strategies and customer expectations. Less than truckload (LTL) shipments are being replaced by frequent ground package shipments or multiple stop milk runs to gain control, visibility and delivery stability. Past paradigms of transportation “givens” must be rethought and reviewed to ensure that inventory and customer requirements are driving transportation methods.

Milk Run is one of the advanced delivery concepts that can improve your transportation management system. Milk Run Delivery means a routing of a supply or delivery vehicle to make multiple pickups or drop-offs at different locations on a regularly scheduled basis.

by : TeamKita