Content area
Full Text
1. Introduction
Today, businesses are under tremendous pressure to be competitive in their chosen markets. The existing market conditions challenge manufacturing firms to strengthen and maintain their capabilities to compete in the marketplace. The current globalizing trends, the rapid technological changes, the advances in manufacturing technology and more demanding and well-informed customers are forcing manufacturing organizations to optimize their manufacturing processes, operations, and supply chains to be able to deliver value to customers (Karim and Arif-Uz-Zaman, 2013).
Manufacturing organizations are under pressure to improve productivity and reduce costs through the realization of lean manufacturing (Chauhan and Singh, 2012). Its practices and tools are among the key concepts that assist managers and engineers in sustaining competitiveness in an expanding global market (Zahraee, 2016).
According to Womack et al. (1990), lean production is “lean” because it uses less of everything compared with mass production – half the human effort in a factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time. Also, it requires far less than half the needed inventory on site, results in significantly fewer defects and produces a greater and ever-growing variety of products.
Bayou and Korvin (2008) improved this definition by stating that manufacturing leanness is a strategy to incur less input to better achieve the organization’s goals through producing better output. “Input” refers to the physical quantity of resources used and their costs, and “output” refers to the quality and quantity of the products sold and the corresponding customer services.
The key idea of lean is to be highly responsive to customer demand by reducing waste (Bhamu and Sangwan, 2014). The lean definition of waste includes work in progress (WIP), defects and non-value-added time, such as the time the worker spends waiting for products and executing unnecessary movements. Cost reduction strategies are directed toward specific efforts which reduce the resources spent on poor quality products, reducing the WIP value and decreasing transportation costs. Lean thinking also aims towards the realization of flexible processes and the reduction of overburden and stress, which generate waste (Benton et al., 2011).
Womack and Jones (2003) defined five lean principles to eliminate waste in organizations: specifying value, identifying the value stream, flow, pull,...