Cost
of the production has become big enemy for manufacturing companies, Lean
manufacturing is a business model and collection of tactical methods that
emphasize eliminating non-value added activities (waste) while delivering
quality products on time at least cost with greater efficiency. Lean
implementation is rapidly expanding throughout diverse manufacturing and
service sectors such as aerospace, automotive, electronics, furniture
production, and health care as a core business strategy to create a competitive
advantage. Toyota is the very famous automobile company which has developed
Lean manufacturing system. So they are experts in Lean productions.
Lean
manufacturing system is a collection of lot of manufacturing supporting
concepts. Few of those concepts are 5S concept, Kaizen, Kanban, PDCA ( Plan,
Do, Check, Act ), KPI ( key performance indicator), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) etc.
Lean
manufacturing is based on finding efficiencies and removing wasteful steps that
don't add value to the end product. There's no need to reduce quality with lean
manufacturing the cuts are a result of finding better, more efficient ways of
accomplishing the same tasks.
To
find the efficiencies, lean manufacturing adopts a customer value focus, asking
"What is the customer willing to pay for?" Customers want value, and
they'll pay only if you can meet their needs. They shouldn't pay for defects,
or for the extra cost of having large inventories. In other words, they
shouldn't pay for your waste.
Waste
is anything that doesn't add value to the end product. In Lean Manufacturing,
mainly there are seven categories of waste , it can be demonstrated
briefly as following manner.
- Overproduction – Are you producing more than consumers demand?
- Waiting – How much lag time is there between production steps?
- Inventory (work in progress) – Are your supply levels and work in progress inventories too high?
- Transportation – Do you move materials efficiently?
- Over-processing – Do you work on the product too many times, or otherwise work inefficiently?
- Motion – Do people and equipment move between tasks efficiently?
- Defects – How much time do you spend finding and fixing production mistakes?
Figure
No 01 : Seven type of waste
If
we can minimize above mentioned seven waste, it will be a great win for our
company. Because all value added unwanted expenses can be saved and it will be
a big amount of money for large manufacturing factories. Expenses for
implementing lean manufacturing system is very less, only thing that need is a
good knowledge about the process. If manufactures can plan their process
according to the lean system, they can see out- come of the system very
quickly. Lean system cannot be implanted without top managers approval, so
people who are responsible for the production process should make proposal to
top people by mentioning advantages of the Lean system for the company growth.
When
considering above mentioned facts, It can be understood that mechanical
engineers have responsibility to implement lean manufacturing system very effectively
in their working place. Because they are the people who have lot of experience
in manufacturing and production processes. Most of the directors, general
managers, factory engineers etc are mechanical engineers, so they always
responsible for company profits and stability of their market. Implementation
of lean system to all production processes
definitely make higher profits. So mechanical engineers must have better understanding about above mentioned things
