How Lean Manufacturing Helps Our Economy Essay

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything than in mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment tools and less engineering time to develop a new product. A company becomes lean by continuously increasing its capacity to produce high-quality goods while simultaneously decreasing

“Lean is a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste (non-value-added activities) through continuous improvement by flowing the **product at the pull of the customer in pursuit of perfection.” Lockwood [24].

The company should also focus on lean manufacturing because it has certain positive points like increase of efficiency, decrease in the waste, improvement of control and also this will create the unique demand and need of the customer in terms of products. It will also offer cost savings strategy and will maximize the high amount of values ​​with high

Lean production is an incorporated group of activities set up to attain high volume production by using low inventories of raw materials, processing goods, and finished goods (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006). Using a lean production process, the China plant will be able to produce goods at a lower cost. Riordan China plant will need to eliminate any waste in the production process to achieve the highest level of efficiency.

Lean production of vehicles was started in Japan by Toyota company. It has some similarities with the mass production; however, it is quite different from the craft production. One of the main similarities that the lean production shares with the mass production is that they both use the assembly line for the production of the vehicles, which was initiated by Ford. Unlike, mass production: “Ohno placed a cord above every work station and instructed worker to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that they couldn’t fix” (56). In the mass production, if the problem occurred, and no one paid attention to it while the production process, then the car company had to fix the errors in all the vehicles that had been produced no matter how large the quantity was. In the lean production of vehicles: “Ohno instead instituted a system of problem-solving called “the five why’s” (56). Taiichi Ohno, the founder of Toyota company, made sure that once the problem has been identified in the production process, then what kind of precautions company can take to prevent the problem, so it never occurs again, which saved a lot of time compared to mass production. One similarity that lean production has with the craft production is that the vehicles were not produced on a larger scale, rather they were diverse small vehicles, such as trucks and cars. In the mass production, changing the die cut process took months; however, in the lean production process reduced

The basic concepts involved in lean and lean manufacturing was originated from The Toyota, one of the Japanese automaker in the global competition since decades. In 1988, Taiichi Ohno brought the lean concept into operation for the first time at Toyota and called it as Toyota Production System (TPS), to overcome economic crisis due to World War II. TPS was mainly developed to flourish with minimum resources. Owing to the immense shortages of material, human and financial resources, TPS had no other option but to choose the waste reduction policy to cut down the costs at the shop floor. Even in the hard economic crisis, Toyota sustained and was successful because of its higher efficiency in operation and improved production system. In the meantime, inadequacy of the resources which was at first an obstacle to the company transformed into an opportunity to establish Toyota as a world class car manufacturer. ‘Lean’ approach was slowly applied in many manufacturing and management floors over the last few decades.

Lean manufacturing a systematic approach to doing more with less. In other words, Lean, is a method of increasing the amount of a manufacturer’s output, while reducing the amount of resources put in. Lean is of great interest to manufacturers around the world. Companies of all sizes employ lean principles to employ large improvements to quality, marketability and customer service.

Lean manufacturing is referred to the methods of manufacturing that gives maximum value and minimum waste in the process that is followed. Lean manufacturing is also used to focus on the resources to maximize the value added features and eliminate the non-value added features.

Lean is a conspicuous theory and application which expects the use of a wide range of assets for any reason, other than the production of significant worth for the end client to be inefficient, and subsequently an objective for prohibition. The theory and mindset communicated by an arrangement of standards, supplemented by various devices and systems helps for waste abolition, equipped execution change, stock diminishment, and ideal quality level to the end clients. It is one of the principal and far reaching ideas that add to organizations everywhere throughout the globe to increase upper hand and thrive on the global market. (Čiarnienė & Vienažindienė, 2015)

Lean Manufacturing is an approach taken by manufacturing organization to increase efficiency through optimization and maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Traditionally, Lean principles were applied to manufacturing industries especially automotive companies. However, with the success in automotive industry, it no longer limited to automotive sector and can be applied in other manufacturing sectors as well as services industries (Balle, et al., 2006). The drivers for implementing Lean in both manufacturing and service sectors are customer demands for better quality products and services, managerial demands for cost reduction and sustaining in an increasing market competitiveness.

Lean manufacturing has become one of the most acceptable forms of manufacturing technique among the various manufacturers. The aim of the report is to analyze the advantages and limitation of the lean manufacturing process. A detail analysis of the system will be done by referring to a number of scientific journals based on the same topic.

It has been quite a while since lean manufacturing was started to be implemented. After Toyota’s huge success, many companies started looking at lean as a panacea to all the problems their companies were facing, and started to replicate Toyota’s efforts. The lack of holistic understanding of lean philosophy lead to most of the early failures. People knew that lean clearly had the potential of wide applications, even outside the manufacturing industries. However, even after the philosophy was mature enough to show successful results for some companies, the success rate of lean implementation was very limited, in some cases, as low as 50% [citation required]. Thus, effort has been taking place in order to identify the reasons

As usual, every theory implemented has its own limitation. For lean thinking, it can help manufacturing industry to achieve in minimizing the waste activity. However, lean manufacturing has not been accepted by all users. For instance, difficulty in having human coordination and the limitation in applicability outside monotonous manufacturing environments are the weaknesses that

According to (Rouse, 2013), lean management is a method of running a business that supports the concept of constant improvement. Therefore, lean management is a long-term approach to work that thoroughly seeks to achieve small, incremental changes in processes in order to improve efficiency and quality. The theory was first established between 1948 and 1975 by Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo the two Japanese engineers (Arnheiter and Maleyeff, 2005). But the method was initially found in the works of Henry Ford, who “Ohno greatly appreciated and studied Ford because of his accomplishments and the reduction of waste at early Ford assembly plants” (Arnheiter and Maleyeff, 2005). Thus Lean management eliminates all forms of waste, decreasing errors, shrinking inventory and ordering or supplying parts “just-in-time,” therefore decreasing warehousing costs. (Rand, 2013) identified the seven forms of waste, including waste in unnecessary motion, over-processing and transportation. Thus by doing this it will saves the business money and allows workers to pay attention to more value-creating activities. There are four main principles of lean which are (Rouse, 2013) firstly defining the value from the perspective of the end customer, identifying each steps in a business process and eliminating non value activities, making the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence and then finally repeating the first three steps on a constantly basis until all the waste has been eliminated. The

Lean Manufacturing is primarily concerned with removing waste from the production process. (Pham, Dimov and O 'Hagan, 2001)