Improvement Of Manufacturing Operations Through A Lean Management Approach

Production practices have had an important role in satisfying the dynamic market. Many approaches have being developed in order to respond effectively to specific business requirements. In fact, some areas of management have focused its study on the overseeing, designing, and controlling the process of production in an effort to find the best methodology that ensures the business success and performance. However, complexities arise in this field because many variables such as costs, inventory, scheduling, suppliers, etc have to be considered in any business. Lean approach and the traditional approach are two points of view that aim to address this complexities, and those will be examined in this essay.

Countess firms have taken up lean production in their manufacturing process. This is because the process is known to have countless benefits when effectively implemented. For lean production to be effectively implemented, some principles have to be considered. These principles have been discussed in detail in this paper. The different principled in lean production as well as the different principles in effective business communication. How they are related and hence how they lead better production and hence better output from the firm.

Later on, many service industries have adopted the philosophy of Lean with the aim of improving their quality of service, processes, methods and resulting a better customer satisfaction. The study made revealed that although the Lean Manufacturing was designed and developed for the manufacturing industries initially, it is now proven that even the service industries could implement the Lean principles as well, and increasing the customer satisfaction.

Lean is defines the manufacturing philosophy that reduces the time between the shipping and customer demand, which based on the systematic method by eliminating waste, that means giving the customer what they want when they want it, and don 't waste whatever. Rahmana, Sharif and Esa (2013) suggested lean production is mentioned to improve the company 's performance from the philosophy in reducing waste in order. That means, lean system destination is the decrease cost by removing the non-value activities, which they are applying a category of tools and techniques for checking and eliminating defective in the production process. In the Evenort Company should emulate the five overriding principles of lean thinking in terms of implementing lean that there is guarantee the company has been driving correctly in the lean manufacturing (Cardiff 2015) as can show in table 1.

In their book The Story of Lean Production – Toyota’s Secret Weapon in the Global Car Wars That is Revolutionizing World Industry, published in 2007, James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos generally introduce and discuss about three industrial manufacturing methods from the very first approach to the most current one, which are craft production, mass production, and lean production respectively. Basically, their main points are focusing on lean production and its development as well as related issues.

Operations and supply chain management is a concept that has flourished in domains such as manufacturing and express industry by offering a methodology to solve and relieve waste problems. There are two main approaches in operations and supply chain management: lean approach and conventional approach. In this assignment, I will compare the two approaches by summarizing their characteristics and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. Finally, I will discuss the key problems faced by transitioning from conventional to lean approach.

Lean Manufacturing seeks to produce high output with low inventory. Lean Manufacturing was originally known as the Toyota production system invented by Sakichi Toyoda. The whole purpose is to lower waste and increase profit and output. This paper will discuss the history of lean manufacturing Lean manufacturing and the transition and steps involved with Just-In-time manufacturing. Lean manufacturing defines waste as anything that absorbs resources but creates no value. So what is considered waste? The main concepts of Just-In-Time manufacturing are to eliminate waste and excess inventory stocks. Toyota was the developer of these techniques, a lot of Toyotas concepts were derived from Henry Ford’s methods.

In our economy today we face major issues dealing with manufacturing with how do we build or retain the capacity and competitive edge in the global market? Well manufactured is measured in a number of ways, such as statistics and analyses. These metrics range from the amount and type of goods produced, to a detailed breakdown of the people who contribute to this production, to the economic impact of both. But knowing the market is tough using lean manufacturing techniques as a tool any company can maintain control of an operation of any business.

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 is a quality management program that was made popular at the Toyota Corporation. Its main philosophy involves eliminating wasteful or unnecessary steps in the process and creating value for customers. Toyota’s past president identified seven types of waste to be eliminated from the supply chain. They are waste from overproduction, wasting time, transportation waste, inventory waste, processing waste, waste of motion and waste from defects. Organizations that successfully implement Lean methodologies can reap dramatic benefits (Jacobs & Chase,

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

Lean manufacturing is an exercise that is based on waste minimization. It considers the utilization of resources for any activity other than the creating value for the customer, as waste. Basically, lean is centered on “Delivering value with less work by eliminating waste” (Liker, 1997). Lean manufacturing philosophy involves never ending efforts to reduce or eliminate 'muda' (Waste) in manufacturing processes.

The cement industry is ideal example of the continuous process manufacturing where the traditional mass production system is adopted in order to produce, accumulate, and move thousands tons of materials between the work areas. The nowadays challenge is to change the cement industry from traditional mass production into more effective production system aiming to increase the productivity, overall performance, and capacity utilization to meet high marker demand. The cement industry is forced to reduce the production costs and delay times in order to take advantages in the global competition environments.

“In academia, the majority of the operations management literature focuses on the application of lean manufacturing in large discrete organizations (Moreno-Luzon, 1993). [3] Few academic articles even started to raise interests over the straightforward application of lean manufacturing in processing industries (Abdulmalek and Rajgopal, 2007 &; Melton, 2005) [4]. The specific characteristic of goods and/or processes in processing industries offers a great demand to the application of lean manufacturing” (Abdulmalek et al., 2006; Van Donk and Van Dam, 1996) [5].