Improve the business performance in production environment by using Lean Manufacturing

Abstract

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, "Lean", is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Lean manufacturing is based on finding efficiencies and removing wasteful steps that don't add value to the end product. There's no need to reduce quality with lean manufacturing – the cuts are a result of finding better, more efficient ways of accomplishing the same tasks. Lean manufacturing is simply a continuously progressive way of producing what the customer wants, when they want it, at a price they are prepared to pay and using least resource. The development of Lean was little known or understood outside Japan until the 1970's. Britain gained early experience of Lean manufacturing from the establishment of Toyota, Nissan and Honda plants in the UK. The main tools of a lean manufacturing program are Value Stream Mapping, 5S, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED), and six sigma .each of these tools focuses on certain aspects and areas of the manufacturing process in order to help improve costs and efficiencies in a company. To find the efficiencies, lean manufacturing adopts a customer-value focus, asking "What is the customer willing to pay for?" Customers want value, and they'll pay only if you can meet their needs. They shouldn't pay for defects, or for the extra cost of having large inventories. In other words, they shouldn't