Lean Literature Review

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

The lean philosophy centers on the elimination of waste in all forms in an organisation (Shpak, 2016). Lean is usually implemented by initially conducting training, initiating pilot projects and implementing changes (Poksinska, 2010). Some of the benefits of lean implementation includes: improves quality and safety; improves staff moral; improves throughput; improves delivery and helps in cost reduction (Jones and Mitchel, 2006; NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement 2007). The challenges of lean implementation include: resistance to change and lack of team work; limited communication and leadership and staff having less knowledge of the lean concept (Grove et al., 2010; Halling and Wijk, 2013 and Poksinska, 2010). This research is to explore some challenges of

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.

“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].

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

This paper presents a relevant contribution for practitioners and managers to deal with the implementation of lean. It shows that through the effective use of available tools to measure the lean manufacturing implementation of the company. Lean methods are available for them to identify specific problems and opportunities to improve the lean practice implementation.

Under the lean production approaches, a number of factors are essential to the process for

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.

“Lean means creating more value for customers with less” (Krejewski, L., Ritzman, L.P., & Malhotra, M.K., 2013). Implementing this into a project can make the project very successful at a lower rate of cost and time. There are five steps in allowing the lean process to work successfully. This process is easy to remember but not always easy to achieve. Specifying the value from the customer’s point of view of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing is the first step. Identifying all the steps of value for the product the customer wants to purchase and eliminating the steps that are unnecessary is the second step. Creating a sequence of steps that flow in a consistent fashion and will flow smoothly toward the customer is the third step. Introducing the flow of the product that the customer is interested in purchasing and allowing the customer to pull value from the product is the fourth step. The fifth and final step in the lean technique process is “as value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste” (Lean Enterprises Institute, 2015).

The application and implementation of lean principles or thinking is a process that requires commitment from every stakeholder in the organization. This process entails commitment to the organization's workers and to the system itself in order to make changes towards improvement. Generally, the implementation of lean thinking is geared towards continuous improvement through the elimination of waste. However, lean management or implementation of the principles sometimes incorporate mistakes that are made by leaders in the execution process. This is mainly because lean leadership appears to be simple though its complex because of the costs associated with it. The mistakes usually occur because of intrinsic complexities of exploring deeply into organizational philosophies, business strategy, psychology, and macroeconomics.

 Comparing and contrasting the implementation of Lean Manufacturing in manufacturing and service industries:...................................................Page no.8-9

The concept of Lean Manufacturing was not quickly adopted by the United States manufacturing companies because of the cost incurred by changing the old manufacturing processes; the perceived need did not outweigh the benefits. In the 1970’s and the1980’s manufacturing companies in the United States took a closer look when Japanese and Chinese companies were selling similar products as the United States like cars, trucks, electronics, and toy, but at lower cost to the U.S. consumers. Companies within the United States urgently sought out experts from Japan to understand this new method due to declining revenues and the realization they were being forced out of market share. They learned that the concept of Lean Manufacturing was to change the goals by exposing waste in all areas within the manufacturing process with an increased focus to satisfy

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.

Lean Construction is inspired from the Toyota Production. Toyota production provided the Transform -Flow –Value(TFV) philosophy of production in 1950’s.(Koskela, 1992).According to this philosophy the production is not only transformation of the inputs to outputs but there exists a flow of resources and information which seeks to generate

n. Knowledge sharing and best practice based on real life lean implementation from other industries