Lean Manufacturing Literature Review

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Literature review Womack, J P and Jones, D T summarised Lean Production as ‘doing more and more with less and less’. Rineheart, J., Huxley, C., Robertson, D (1997) stated that lean manufacturing will be the standard means of manufacturing in the 21st century, Dankbaar (1997) added that there is no other alternative to lean manufacturing. The general consensus amongst researchers is, that if properly implemented lean manufacturing would be the means to achieving world class manufacturing status (Papadopoulu & Ozbayrak 2005). Convis (2001) highlighted that human involvement was the most important factor in the implementation of lean manufacturing. Bhasin & Burcher (2006) said that it is a ‘way of thinking’ and that it must be uppermost in…show more content…
What is the customer prepared to pay for? The premise of lean thinking is to identify ‘value’. Taiichi Ohno was a strong advocate of eliminating waste or ‘muda’. He defined ‘waste’ as any form of human activity that did not add value to the product. Ohno mapped the process or what we know today as ‘value stream’ to monitor the ‘flow’ of product through the process. Lack of ‘flow’ is characterised by ‘bottlenecks’ that cause delays in production. Compensation for this ‘lack of flow’ is achieved by ‘over-production’; this typically results in excess inventory. Ohno identified seven forms of waste and developed what became know as the Toyota Production System and shared his ideas with the…show more content…
A summary of the definition of JIT according to the APICS dictionary is JIT is a management philosophy based on planning, whose primary aim is to have only the required inventory at the next step when required: to have zero defects, to reduce the lead times by the reduction of change over times, reducing batch sizes to prevent waiting for work and to continuously revise the operations to remove waste. Ho and Chang, 2001: Stevenson, 2002 described Big JIT as a management philosophy of the firms production activities and Little JIT as the internal pull system. The success of Lean implementation in larger companies has been widely publicised. Companies like, Toyota, General Electric but there are only 16 journal articles relating to the implementation of Lean in small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in the last 20 years Bakas, O., Govaert, T and Van Landeghem, H (2011) Critical Success Factors (CSFs) according to Rokart as the “areas in which results, if they are satisfactory, will ensure successful competitive performance for the organization’. A review of existing literature on CSFs for the implementation of lean manufacturing by Rose, A.N.M., Deros, B.M., and Rahman, M.N.A highlighted 12

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