PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT OF BATCH MANUFACTURING USING LEAN CONCEPT

Abstract

In today's competitive world, it has become necessity for the manufacturer to keep wastages at low level in their processes not only to earn more profit but also to become market leader. To obtain such objective, most of the successful companies have followed lean concepts in their processes for the last 25 years. Now a day, lean manufacturing has become an effective tool to combat hurdles like throughput, lead time, time to market, inventory management. More over their principles have been extensively used for eliminating wastages and stream line their processes. Lean concepts like kanban, 5s, value stream mapping, SMED, continuous improvement, visual controls, poke yoke have become vital tools in combating with the hurdles in batch manufacturing environment like high lead time, WIP inventory and scrap thus helping them in sustaining in the market and to make more profit. Obstacles and challenges in modern business have given a significant drift towards adopting lean production. In the present study an approach has been presented for finding leanness of batch manufacturing and thus highlights the problematic areas and subsequently implementation of lean tools in order to come over them. Case study gives a valuable statement how lean tool improves the performance of manufacturing plant. It takes help of VSM and model for calculating LN has taken for identifying the existing wastages and thus showing areas of improvements.