Time-to-Serve®

Time is now recognised as a major competitive lever for organisations and a major focus in creating the most effective and efficient customer-driven supply chains.

The concept of the agile supply chain is accepted as the route to customer responsiveness. Time competition has three major elements in the supply chain - the removal of non-value adding time, the velocity of the chain and its responsiveness to demand.

While Cost-to-Serve® looks at the costs across the supply chain, Time-to-Serve® quantifies lead times and identifies where time is wasted across business activities and processes. The objective is to compress time in order to create a more responsive supply chain and to reduce cost.

How Time-to-Serve® works

Time-to-Serve® combines the principles of lean thinking and just-in-time processes with time compression - but critically it also shows where costs are incurred and where value is added over time. This gives companies a more integrated view of where real improvements can be made while driving higher service levels in terms of availability.

Information is gathered from the key areas of the business in order to generate an integrated view of how time is consumed and what drives each process. Non-essential activities can then be engineered from the new chain.

Benefits of Time-to-Serve®

Time-to-Serve® provides a rapid understanding of the major areas for operational improvement and the likely benefits that can be achieved in terms of reduced lead times and cost.