Application of Lean Service Techniques and Supply Chain Management : A Case Study at UPS Stockholm

Lean Production, simply called Lean, is one of the most powerful concepts recently employed by many manufacturers and service providers in order to improve the quality of their products, eliminate any non-value adding activities from operation and reducing the costs of production. Relatively, Lean Services concept is created based on Lean Manufacturing to include service sectors. Many wastes exist within production and potentially all the processes related to that. Seven different types of wastes were being redefined over time to better fit service operations. A significant number of techniques have been defined in the Lean concept; make it possible to execute required actions for achieving such an improvement. Looking closer from different perspectives to operation helps the analyst to find the hidden wastes in the processes. With the help of Lean concept finding bottlenecks and problems will be much easier as wastes are categorized into different forms, so the analyst knows exactly where to look for it. After analyzing the current state, the next effort for executer is to try to eliminate these wastes and optimize the processes by applying Lean and other supply chain techniques. A future state then will be created to solve the problems observed in the current operating state and most importantly this state will offer a much smoother production flow and less wastage in the operation. This thesis is involved with use of Lean and Supply Chain tools in one of the UPS local centers aiming to operate on Lean principles in the end. This will bring the company continues improvement on the processes which helps the company in many aspects