Lean, whilst driven by well understood tools is at its heart a creative process. This understanding has driven my working life and helped me to consistently deliver sustained competitive advantage from a manufacturing operation or wider supply chain, both as a consultant and operational manager. My personal success has come from my love of "making things" and my desire to help UK based companies to operate more competitively on the world stage. This has set lean in a wider context as part of the overall optimisation of the "cost to serve", balancing manufacturing cost with distribution and inventory holding costs to deliver the service the market demands.Understanding this is great, but it is my range of experience, emotional intelligence and leadership skills that have taken interesting ideas into the delivery of sustained competitive advantageSpecialities: Lean Manufacturing, Supply Chain Strategy and optimisation, Programme and Project Management, Sales and marketing of Consultancy, Organisational leadership - not just management
This page shows all the current person engages with BestPractice.Club across:
Why expediting becomes the default response in volatile supply chains. A discussion with practitioners reveals how unresolved structural trade-offs around service, inventory, cost and capacity push organisations into reactive firefighting rather than deliberate resilience.
When resilience ambitions become real, working capital becomes the point of decision. This article explores how resilience translates into cash exposure, why short-term responses harden into long-term cost, and how planning disciplines determine whether working capital becomes a constraint or a strategic lever.
Resilience is widely agreed as a priority — but rarely defined in operational terms. This article explores what resilience actually means in practice, why many responses default to inventory and buffers, and how cost, time, and sustainability determine whether resilience strengthens the business or quietly undermines it.
Supply chains designed for cost and efficiency are now operating in a permanently unstable world. In this conversation, Tim Richardson, CEO of Iter Consulting, explains why volatility is no longer cyclical, why confidence among supply-chain leaders has eroded, and why resilience must be designed into networks rather than bolted on after disruption hits. He argues that adaptability depends less on chasing new technology and more on clear thinking, sound foundations, and leadership capable of making decisions before the next crisis arrives.
How do you make confident innovation and investment decisions in supply chain planning when uncertainty, stakeholder misalignment and execution risk are often bigger constraints than technology itself?
When working capital is tight and volatility persists, what practical levers do you actually have to build resilience beyond simply carrying more inventory?