A lean shop floor tracking system

Abstract

Lean production and push production are the two major types of production control philosophy. Push production has acquired the benefits of computerization from standard packages for a long time. On the other hand, lean production emphasizes human involvement, and its computerization is relatively late in comparison and has not yet acquired standard package. To make the information flow more real-time and intellectual, this paper presents a shop floor tracking system for lean production. The system upgrades the shop floor computerization of lean production to the same level as its counterpart in push production, and at the same time reduces waste and delay from physical kanban. In addition, the lean SFT can be integrated with conventional ERP, thus not only giving lean production the best benefits of ERP, but also making ERP more effective and flexible in shop floor control. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.