Delivering excellent service to all customers is the key imperative for many sustainable businesses. So why do so many supply chains struggle to fulfill customer requirements at competitive costs? The answer is simple: traditional supply chain planning, which was tailored to a predominantly stable and predictable business environment, cannot handle the new challenges in the world of variability, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—the VUCA world.

Companies can either accept the drawbacks that often result in high inventories, poor asset utilization, and unsatisfactory customer service or, they can change their view of the fundamental approach to supply chain management. LEAN Supply Chain Planning: The New Supply Chain Management Paradigm for Process Industries to Master Today’s VUCA World introduces a new paradigm and a new approach to managing variability, uncertainty, and complexity in today’s planning processes and systems.

Introducing a cutting-edge supply chain management concept that addresses current problems in the process industry's supply chains, the book presents powerful methods developed by leading research institutes, process industry champions, and supply chain experts. It explains how readers can change their approach to the fundamental planning paradigms in a manner that will help their organizations achieve higher levels of responsiveness, improved levels of customer service, and substantial increases in cost-efficiencies.

This holistic practitioner’s guide describes how to establish the right accountabilities for performance management and also provides a set of meaningful metrics to help measure your progress. Supplying detailed guidelines for transforming your supply chain, it includes first-hand reports of leading organizations that have already adopted some of the facets of this paradigm and used the relevant instruments to achieve unprecedented improvements to customer service, supply chain agility, and overall equipment effectiveness.