Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing: 1.       Lean technologyrefers to manufacturing with minimal waste. In manufacturing, waste has many forms, such as material, time, unused capacity, idleness, and inventory.

2.       Lean manufacturing aims at eliminating waste in terms of non-value adding operations, tasks, tools, equipment, and resources in general. Knowing that the waste in a company may represent 70% or more of its available resources emphasizes the need for seeking improvement and opens the door wide for implementing and benefiting from various lean manufacturing techniques.

3.       Commonly used lean manufacturing techniques include

•    JIT pull/Kanban systems
•       SMED, cellular manufacturing
•      The 5S system Kaizen
•       Total productive maintenance
•      Visual controls, line balancing
•        Workplace organization
•       Standardized work procedures

4.       Although initially most of the lean efforts were focused on manufacturing operations, lean applications are increasingly being transferred from the shop floor to the office and to the service sector.

5.       Recent lean applications involve eliminating waste in the entire organization (including manufacturing and such manufacturing support functions as purchasing, scheduling, shipping, and accounting).

6.       The use of lean manufacturing is growing simply because it provides a company with the key competitive advantages of reduced costs and improved effectiveness.

7.       Although most lean definitions include the term eliminationof wastein every area of production, it is often more practical and more motivating to practitioners to use the term reductionof wastein every area of the value chain.

8.       The value chainis viewed as a wide spectrum of interrelated business functions, including product development, supply chain, marketing, distribution, after-sale service, customer relations, and any other business segment.

9.       The goal is to maintain high performance by establishing a highly responsive system to varying customer needs, and by producing world-class-quality products and services in the most efficient and economical manner possible.

10.   The primary results that are expected from applying lean manufacturing to a production or service process include:

a)      Lead-time reduction

b)      Inventory reduction

c)       Defect reduction

d)      Improved utilization of resource capacity

e)      Delivery rate improvement

f)       Productivity increase

g)      Cost per unit reduction

Cellular Manufacturing

1.       In a manufacturing context, a cell is a group of workstations arranged to process a certain product entirely or partially, or to perform a certain function on a group of products.

2.       An ideal cell is self-contained, with all the necessary equipment and resources.

3.       In lean manufacturing, cells are formed to facilitate production and minimize flow, travel, and material handling. To this end, equipment and workstations are arranged in a sequence that supports a smooth flow of materials and components through the process, with minimal transport or delay.

4.       Cellular manufacturing is achieved when all of the resources required to complete the product are grouped together. Thus, a cellular layout can more easily accommodate single-piece flow by eliminating the handling and queue times inherent in a traditional departmentalized layout.

5.       Cellular configurations can take several forms:

a)      Circular

b)      S-shaped

c)       W shaped

d)      U-shaped