Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream (EN)

Your products reach the customer eventually. But at what cost? Excess inventory, unreliable delivery times, emergency shipments and constant firefighting between warehouses, suppliers and sales. These are not bad-luck problems, they are system problems.

Most organisations optimise individual links in their supply chain without ever seeing the chain as a whole. The result is a fulfillment stream full of waste, hidden costs and missed customer expectations. Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream shows you how to see the whole stream, and how to redesign it.

What will you learn in Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream?

This workbook extends the logic of Value Stream Mapping into the world of supply chains and logistics. Starting from the raw material supplier and ending at the end customer, Martichenko and Von Grabe guide you step by step through the analysis and redesign of your entire fulfillment stream.

You will learn how to draw a current-state map of your fulfillment stream, identifying the seven forms of waste specific to logistics and distribution. From there, you design a future-state map built around pull, kanban and levelling and create a concrete plan to get there.

Key topics covered include the Total Cost of Fulfillment: moving beyond unit price thinking to understand what your supply chain truly costs. You'll work with the Plan for Every Part (PFEP) to make smarter decisions about inventory levels, replenishment frequency and supplier collaboration. And you'll discover the 8 Rights, the eight conditions that must be in place to deliver exactly what the customer needs, when they need it.

The workbook also addresses how to manage the transformation itself: building cross-functional and cross-company alignment, applying PDCA in the fulfillment context, and using Lean metrics to track real progress.

Why should I read Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream?

Learning to See taught the world how to map a production value stream. This workbook does the same for the fulfillment stream and it fills a gap that most Lean practitioners feel but struggle to address.

Supply chains are notoriously difficult to improve precisely because they span multiple organisations, functions and time horizons. This book gives you a shared language and a practical method that works across those boundaries. It doesn't just describe what a Lean fulfillment stream looks like, it shows you how to build one, step by step, using the same workbook format that has made the Lean Enterprise Institute series so effective worldwide.

If you have applied Lean in operations and are ready to extend that thinking into your supply chain, this is the logical next step.

Who is Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream written for?

·       Supply chain managers and logistics professionals looking to apply Lean beyond the factory floor
·       Operations managers who want to connect their internal improvements to the wider fulfillment system
·       Lean practitioners who have worked with Learning to See and want to extend their value stream thinking
·       Procurement and planning professionals involved in supplier relationships and inventory management

What do fellow authors say about this book?

"Martichenko and Von Grabe have done something rare: they've taken complex supply chain thinking and made it genuinely actionable. This workbook belongs on the shelf of every serious Lean practitioner." — Jim Womack, founder Lean Enterprise Institute

"Finally, a practical guide that connects Lean operations to the fulfillment stream. The Total Cost of Fulfillment framework alone is worth the read." — Dan Jones, co-author of The Machine That Changed the World

Extra information

About the authors

Robert Martichenko is a supply chain expert, author and Lean practitioner with decades of experience in logistics and fulfillment. He is the founder of LeanCor Supply Chain Group and has helped numerous organisations transform their supply chains using Lean principles. His work focuses on making the connection between Lean operations and the broader fulfillment system, a gap he identified early in his career and has dedicated much of his writing to closing.

Kevin Von Grabe is a logistics and supply chain specialist with deep expertise in Lean fulfillment design. Working alongside Martichenko, he contributed the operational detail and implementation experience that makes this workbook particularly practical for frontline managers and supply chain teams.