Applying Lean Tools to Improve the Performance of a Small and Medium-Sized Cutlery Company

Abstract

Today’s VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous) world and the continuous search for new products and services requires companies to pursuing excellence and continuous improvement. This paper aims to describe a lean implementation project developed in a Portuguese cutlery SME. Action-research was adopted as research method. The production processes of the most representative products (spoons, forks and knives) were analyzed with adequate tools (e.g. VSM – value stream mapping – and indicators monitoring). The main problems identified were excess of inventory (of both finished products and WIP – work-in-process), and consequent long throughput times and low productivity. The root causes for those problems were investigated. Then, improvement proposals, involving the creation of a system to monitor and control production orders, the implementation of daily kaizen meetings, the redefinition of safety stocks and reorder point of finished products and the promotion of training and creation of work instructions regarding equipment setups, were developed and implemented to mitigate the identified problems. The implementations had quite positive impacts such as WIP reduction of 255 K€, 38.5% decrease in finished products stock, throughput time reduction from 17.3 to 4.6 days for spoons and forks, and from 12.4 to 6.8 days in the case of knives, and, finally, an overall productivity enhancement of 36.5%.