Lean management of services supply chain : order review and release systems to improve performances

This research seeks to implement the lean philosophy in the service supply chain, with the purpose of increasing the knowledgebase on this topic. This was done using the order review and release systems, that even though they proved to be effective in manufacturing processes, there is little information of their application to service companies and their performance in this specific field. The variability in processing times and a possible estimation of these values is one of the main vectors of this work. This master thesis is purely theoretical and was conducted with the help of simulation modelling. The model of the service supply chain was developed based on the literature review and as an input data, statistical distributions were used. Two kinds of order review and release systems are considered: upper-bound limited workload and lean-based balanced workload model. Their impact on the performance of the service supply chain is described and compared to the results of the model with immediate release. The results show that order review and release systems can perform well even in the conditions of unknown exact processing times and thus can be applied to services as well as they are applied in manufacturing industries. The application of order review and release systems will help to eliminate waste within the service supply chain, make it more flexible and thus increase added value to the customers.