LEAN MANUFACTURING IMPLEMENTATION AND PROGRESS MEASUREMENT

Abstract

Applying Lean manufacturing philosophy is one of the most important concepts that help enterprises to gain competitive advantage in the world market. Lean manufacturing or lean production is a production practice, which regards the use of resources for any work other than the creation of value for the end customer, as waste. Although a lot of companies started implementing Lean concept, and the number of Lean tools, techniques and technologies available to improve operational performance are growing rapidly, only ten percent or less of the companies achieved significant results. The purpose of the paper is creating a model illustrating successful Lean implementation based on prior analysis of Lean implementation progress measurement and the main barriers identification. Implementation of Lean philosophy and principles can be described as a set of actions and processes starting with planning the change and, defining the success factors, and finishing with the implementation and measurement of the progress. For each of the improvement dimensions, several groups of indicators with a set of metrics can show and measure the company's progress: elimination of waste; continuous improvement; continuous flow and pull-driven systems; multifunctional teams; and information systems. Authors of this paper present the original model of the Lean implementation process, which includes success factors, barriers and progress measurement metrics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]