It was a few years after that song was made popular by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell that a small group of west coast outdoor enthusiasts and mountaineers decided to throw conventional retail models to the wind. At that time, mountain climbing wasn't a mainstream sport in the Vancouver BC area.
Instead, they chose a model that was more familiar in the farming communities of the prairies - a Co-op model. Until then, the only reliable place to get quality climbing gear was from REI, a well established outdoor retailer from the United States ( www.rei.com ). This group wanted to make all forms of outdooring accessible and affordable to everyone, and wanted to create a business that more closely aligned to their environmental beliefs and principles. They wanted to share their enthusiasm for the outdoors.
So in 1971, a new and thriving business was created called Mountain Equipment Coop, with 6 members and a whopping $65 of operating capital. Three years later, by 1974, membership had grown to over 700 like minded outdoor enthusiasts.
Fast forward to 2015. From its humble beginnings in Vancouver BC, membership has now grown to over 4 Million with an annual sales revenue of over $336 Million in 2014. MEC is now Canada's largest supplier of outdoor equipment and clothing, with 17 stores in cities across the country.
Through focused vision, leadership, hard work, and the dedication of the MEC team members, business has grown to a point where MEC has made a decision to open a second Distribution Centre (DC) in the greater Toronto area in Ontario. Seems like a natural next step in order to simplify the logistics and stocking of their growing number of stores in the east.
But wait! Start to peel back just one or two layers of that onion, and suddenly the intricacies and linkages all through the supply chain start to emerge. Realizing that the flow of goods from Asia, right from the selection of fabrics at the mills, to the logistics to deliver that cloth to over a dozen different clothing manufacturing factories, to the packing and shipping of finished goods to MEC were all tightly linked in the existing business practices and processes.
Not insurmountable - but complex. Along with 4 other Master Blackbelt candidates, and working shoulder-to-shoulder with the Lean Sensei senior coaches, we set about to help the MEC team break down the complex supply chain to find ways to accommodate both the agility they need while maintaining a means for specific controls. Working to facilitate a number of parallel activities, the MEC teams were able to identify many recommendations that would allow them to address two of the most critical issues identified.
First, the uncoupling of each "order" from the process to "release" parts of the order on a demand basis while still meeting the negotiated "minimum order point" with the manufacturing factories. This was a critical change to their supply chain process that would allow them to move to more of a "pull" model, and avoid transporting and having to store stock that isn't all needed at once. And second, implement a number of changes to the process at MEC that precedes the ordering of manufactured goods. Changing the process to reduce the cycle time and eliminate unnecessary delays and errors by finding ways to consolidate a number of disparate data sources into a single version of the truth that can reliably be used to make better and faster decisions with,
The real credit of course goes to the MEC team members that participated in the 2 days of Kaizen. All they really needed was to be given permission to make changes, the time to properly consider options and test assumptions, and some coaching in Lean supply chain methodology.
It was such a treat to work with so many participants from MEC that all wanted to find improvements and make a difference. I often reflect on how "Lean" isn't the tough part of a continuous improvement initiative - it's changing the culture of an organization and its team members that typically is the most difficult. In the case of MEC, we were treated to an organization that had a clearly defined and positive culture already. That made our jobs incredibly easy and extremely rewarding.
All in all - a very positive experience - but so far, they all have been!
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