How Lean Manufacturing Helps Our Economy Essay

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

Most of the definitions focus on eliminating waste but lean focuses on increasing quality of the product or service to the customer by having the following conditions in mind when producing products and delivering a service according to the Levantar organisation.

Lean production is an incorporated group of activities set up to attain high volume production by using low inventories of raw materials, processing goods, and finished goods (Chase, Jacobs, & Aquilano, 2006). Using a lean production process, the China plant will be able to produce goods at a lower cost. Riordan China plant will need to eliminate any waste in the production process to achieve the highest level of efficiency.

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.

So the elimination of waste is the basic principle of lean manufacturing. Waste sources are all related to each other and getting rid of one source of waste can lead to either elimination of, or reduction in others. The most important source of waste is inventory. Work in process and finished parts inventory do not add value to a product and they should be eliminated or reduced. When inventory is reduced, hidden problems can appear and action can be taken immediately. There are many ways to reduce the amount of inventory, one of which is reducing lot sizes. Reducing lot sizes however, should follow by a setup time reduction so as to make the cost per unit constant as economic order quantity states.

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

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

Lean production is all about gaining more by doing less, such as less time, limited fund and labor and also within a small space. Thus, five major areas that drive the lean manufacturing process are its quality, cost, kind of delivery, safety and morale. By the means of lean manufacturing, a number of advantages can be achieved. These advantages are:

Lean manufacturing a systematic approach to doing more with less. In other words, Lean, is a method of increasing the amount of a manufacturer’s output, while reducing the amount of resources put in. Lean is of great interest to manufacturers around the world. Companies of all sizes employ lean principles to employ large improvements to quality, marketability and customer service.

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 production of vehicles was started in Japan by Toyota company. It has some similarities with the mass production; however, it is quite different from the craft production. One of the main similarities that the lean production shares with the mass production is that they both use the assembly line for the production of the vehicles, which was initiated by Ford. Unlike, mass production: “Ohno placed a cord above every work station and instructed worker to stop the whole assembly line immediately if a problem emerged that they couldn’t fix” (56). In the mass production, if the problem occurred, and no one paid attention to it while the production process, then the car company had to fix the errors in all the vehicles that had been produced no matter how large the quantity was. In the lean production of vehicles: “Ohno instead instituted a system of problem-solving called “the five why’s” (56). Taiichi Ohno, the founder of Toyota company, made sure that once the problem has been identified in the production process, then what kind of precautions company can take to prevent the problem, so it never occurs again, which saved a lot of time compared to mass production. One similarity that lean production has with the craft production is that the vehicles were not produced on a larger scale, rather they were diverse small vehicles, such as trucks and cars. In the mass production, changing the die cut process took months; however, in the lean production process reduced

Lean manufacturing is referred to the methods of manufacturing that gives maximum value and minimum waste in the process that is followed. Lean manufacturing is also used to focus on the resources to maximize the value added features and eliminate the non-value added features.

According to (Rouse, 2013), lean management is a method of running a business that supports the concept of constant improvement. Therefore, lean management is a long-term approach to work that thoroughly seeks to achieve small, incremental changes in processes in order to improve efficiency and quality. The theory was first established between 1948 and 1975 by Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo the two Japanese engineers (Arnheiter and Maleyeff, 2005). But the method was initially found in the works of Henry Ford, who “Ohno greatly appreciated and studied Ford because of his accomplishments and the reduction of waste at early Ford assembly plants” (Arnheiter and Maleyeff, 2005). Thus Lean management eliminates all forms of waste, decreasing errors, shrinking inventory and ordering or supplying parts “just-in-time,” therefore decreasing warehousing costs. (Rand, 2013) identified the seven forms of waste, including waste in unnecessary motion, over-processing and transportation. Thus by doing this it will saves the business money and allows workers to pay attention to more value-creating activities. There are four main principles of lean which are (Rouse, 2013) firstly defining the value from the perspective of the end customer, identifying each steps in a business process and eliminating non value activities, making the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence and then finally repeating the first three steps on a constantly basis until all the waste has been eliminated. The

The basic concepts involved in lean and lean manufacturing was originated from The Toyota, one of the Japanese automaker in the global competition since decades. In 1988, Taiichi Ohno brought the lean concept into operation for the first time at Toyota and called it as Toyota Production System (TPS), to overcome economic crisis due to World War II. TPS was mainly developed to flourish with minimum resources. Owing to the immense shortages of material, human and financial resources, TPS had no other option but to choose the waste reduction policy to cut down the costs at the shop floor. Even in the hard economic crisis, Toyota sustained and was successful because of its higher efficiency in operation and improved production system. In the meantime, inadequacy of the resources which was at first an obstacle to the company transformed into an opportunity to establish Toyota as a world class car manufacturer. ‘Lean’ approach was slowly applied in many manufacturing and management floors over the last few decades.

Lean Manufacturing is primarily concerned with removing waste from the production process. (Pham, Dimov and O 'Hagan, 2001)