Productivity improvement through lean manufacturing

Abstract

Traditionally operated manufacturing industries are facing lot of problems which includes manufacturing cost, longer manufacturing lead time, and quality of the product and customer satisfaction. Even though the lean tool has proven the process improvement consistently, SME’s are not focused much on lean manufacturing philosophies. In this research work carried out in manufacturing industry, by improving productivity and process performance through lean tools such as bottleneck analysis, value stream mapping, kaizen and make or buy decision are used to identify the different problems and to address the variety of solutions. Loading and unloading time can be reduced by using kaizen tool, so that the productivity has been increased. Most of the companies primarily choosen to connect with lean manufacturing for four important reasons to reduce manufacturing resource requirements, to increase customer satisfaction level, and to reduce manufacturing cycle time, in which it increases the profit of the industry. This case study exhibits the various wastes in manufacturing industry such as inventory, lead time reduction and recycling of scrap to improve the productivity. Thus lean tools such as VSM, bottleneck analysis, Kaizen, make or buy decision helps in identify the different type of wastes producing in the organization and possibilities for eliminating/reducing them.