Reducing of Manufacturing Lead Time by Implementation of Lean Manufacturing Principles

Abstract

Many organizations today are  interesting to implementing lean manufacturing principles  that should enable them to eliminating the wastes to reducing a  manufacturing lead time.  This paper concentrates on  increasing  the competitive level of the company in globalization markets and improving of the productivity by reducing the manufacturing lead time. This will be by using the main tool of lean manufacturing which is value stream mapping (VSM) to identifying all the activities of manufacturing process (value and non-value added activities) to reducing elimination of wastes (non-value added activities) by converting a manufacturing system to pull instead of push by applying some of pull system strategies as kanban and first on first out lane (FIFO). ARENA software is used to simulate the current and future state. This work is executed in the state company for electrical industries in Baghdad. The obtained results of the application showed that implementation of lean principles helped on reducing of a manufacturing lead time by 33%.