LEAN
MANUFACTURING
Manufacturing industry around the globe is getting
progress day by day and variations are also increasing. These variations can
result in loss faced by the industries in terms of money, time etc. Lean
manufacturing or simply lean represents the ways that result in reducing the
losses and variability by the use of lean tools. There are 52 lean tools which
are used by different industries all over the world.
Waste
is anything that doesn’t add value to the resulting product. The basic purpose
of using lean tools is to eliminate the wastages that are mainly consists of
seven types that are
1. Transportation
2. Inventory
3. Motion
4. Waiting
5. Over
processing
6. Overproduction
and
7. Defects.
The
approach towards lean is to reduce the wastages that don’t add value to the end
product without compromising on the quality of the end product. The lean
manufacturing process comprises of three main steps starting with
identification of waste in which value stream mapping (VSM) is used to
determine the nature of wastage. After the identification root cause analysis
of waste is done in order to determine the main reason for continuation of the hazard.
With the calculation of the root cause then solve the root cause of the wastage.
The concept of lean tools was originated by Toyota production systems in 1988 these tools include kaizen which
deals with continuous improvement and VSM that determines the solution for the
problem and just in time (JIT) which emphasizes on reducing the inventory size
resulting in applying the pull model, the 5S tools for easiness during the
process and the other different tools for different purposes. Today lean
concept is used by the every industry whether it is automotive or textile
industry or food industry, these tools helped the industry in making their
process less disturbed and more convenient resulting in saving their valuable
time.
(continued)
(Author)
Hashir Mehmood
IM-119 (2012-2013)
IM-119 (2012-2013)
