Lean manufacturing efficiency in engineering practice and sustainability metrics

¶ … Lean Manufacturing

Critique of existing work

Motivation for this research

In this dissertation, we present an analysis of the lean manufacturing processes, tool and applications in the context of engineering practice. The aim of this paper is to determine the efficiency of lean manufacturing to the companies that have adopted the technique. This is carried out via a rigorous analysis of the existing literature on lean manufacturing efficiency. The paper concludes that there is a need to develop a metric for measuring the efficiency of lean manufacturing but which takes into account the metrics of environment and sustainability

The concept of lean manufacturing is noted by Abdulmalek and Rajgopal (2006,p.223) as one of the initiatives that has been adopted by several businesses in the U.S. In their quest to gain a competitive advantage in the competitive global marketplace. The focus of the concept of lean manufacturing is cost reduction through the elimination of the activities that are considered to be non-value adding. The concept of lean manufacturing originated from the production system used by Toyota and incorporates the use of several tools as well as techniques of the processes of lean manufacturing. The techniques used include just-in-time (JIT), production smoothing, total productive maintenance as well as cellular manufacturing among others. The application of lean manufacturing has spanned several sectors that include electronics, automotive as well as the manufacturing of consumer products. Abdullah and Rajgopal (2003) noted that the applications of the various lean manufacturing techniques in the continuous process sector are relatively fewer. In this dissertation, we aim at determining the efficiency of lean manufacturing to the companies that have adopted the technique.

Aim

The aim of this paper is to determine the efficiency of lean manufacturing to the companies that have adopted the technique.

Objective

The objectives of this paper are;

To identify the industries and other sectors that employ lean manufacturing gin streamlining their operations

To present a description of the advantages of employing lean manufacturing techniques in engineering

To present the efficiencies of lean manufacturing in the context of engineering activities/manufacturing

The objective is critique the existing work in lean manufacturing in order to identify the gaps in implementation of lean manufacturing

To come up with a proposition of a better lean manufacturing framework to be used in the preproduction of goods and services by Engineering firms

An over view of lean manufacturing

The work of Womack et al. (1990) indicated that the lean manufacturing technique was pioneered immediately after Second World War when Japanese manufactures were facing a serious shortage of materials, human resources and finances. These unfavorable conditions are what resulted in the inception of the concept of lean manufacturing. Kiichiro Toyoda, who was the then the president of Toyota Motor Company realized that American Automakers were quickly out-producing the Japanese manufactures by a large factor of 10 (Abdullah and Rajgopal,2003).Several Japanese Industrialists then responded by carefully devising a set of new and yet disciplined systems that were process-oriente.The system is currently called "Lean Manufacturing," or the Toyota Production System,." This system was developed in order to pinpoint the main sources of waste and then decisively employing tools such as JIT, setup reduction, production smoothing among others in the elimination of the identified waste. Feld (2000) and Nahmias (2001) presented a description of some of the lean manufacturing tools.

Critique of existing work

Extant literature has been dedicated to the study lean manufacturing efficiency in the context of engineering practices. According to Baines et al. (2006), despite the clear documentation of the beneficial effects of applying lean principles in most manufacturing environments, the application of the lean technique to development of products is still controversial. In addition to this some authors like Papadopolou and Ozbayrak (2005) as well as Shah and Ward (2007), still argue that the process of lean manufacturing in itself has not been defined conclusively. Martinez and Farris (2007), posits that the exact difference in the definition of Lean Product Development and the traditional Product Development is vague. If there exist any consensus in the definition of Lean Product Development, then it arises from the fact that it uses a system of engineering and organizational work principles and techniques that were used by the Toyota Company to help it achieve production time, reduced costing and better quality compared to the traditional Product Development. In spite of all these efforts to get a consensus in the definition of Lean Product Development, the precise set of principles and techniques including the extent to which customization of the approach by the industry and type of project, none has been achieved in any existing literature. A case in point is when Womack, Roos and Jones (1990), defines Lean Product Development without the use of concepts instead they describe simply it as a method used by Japanese automotive manufacturers including Toyota to achieve a drastic decline in the cost of manufacturing as well as the lead time for manufacturing the automobiles in comparison to their western counterparts. Moreover, Womack et al. (1990) identifies what they believe are the set of core Lean Product Developmenttechniques. These according to them include project managers who are overweight, cross functional teams that are dedicated to the vision and mission of theirs companies, decision making processes that is all involving i.e all team members are consulted before any decision affecting the operations of the company are made and engineering that is concurrent.

Other authors like Karsson and Alhstron (1996) have described Lean Product Development as comprising of slightly different techniques compared to the techniques used in the traditional Product Development. Better still some authors have approached this definition ofLean Product Development from a broad perspective stating that it being a philosophy of Product Development, that mainly focuses on the elimination of waste or value maximization in development activities while putting a lot of emphasis on waste elimination in relation to creation of value that varies from author to author (Bianes et al. 2006). Moreover little attempts have been made to have an integration of the finding of the different studies that focused on the different levels that exist in an organization including the tools. Many theorists that have multi-paradigms have continued to stress on the importance of bringing the multiple perspectives together to enhance the development of new insights ( Edwards, 2005).

According to Van de Ven and Poole (2005) one of the most important aspects here it the relationship that exists between the different approaches as well as the new theories that have been integrated to accommodate the divergent views which are strong and have a broad explanation power than the initial perspectives. Furthermore, House et al. ( 1995) argue that there is need to couple theories at the different levels of an organization while ta the same time encouraging researchers to come up with mechanisms that can aid in conceptualizing the complex relationship that exist between the different units at the different levels of analysis within the organization . this therefore means that it is important to first clarify the different perspectives represented herein for example creation of multilevel framework including the analysis of well-established literature that is related to this discussion .

Womack, Jones and Roos (1990) in their canonical work The Machine that Changed the World were the first ones to formally introduce Lean Product Development. Although they mainly focused on manufacturing and assembly processes, they still describe some tools and methods that are used to achieve Lean performance in Product Development including Concurrent Engineering. Consequently it should be noted that there is a strong connection between Lean Product Development and Concurrent Engineering.

Concurrent Engineering has been defined by Winners et al. (1998) as the systematic approach that integrates the concurrent designs of the different products in relation to their manufacturing and supporting processes with the intention to cause developers of these products to consider all the elements that are put together to come up with the products from conception to disposal of the same. These include quality, cost of production as well as schedule and requirements of the user.

According to Maylor (1997), although Concurrent engineering has received a lot of attention from both researchers and practitioners, its application in the industry seems to be minimal. Moreover the surveys conducted by Ainscough and Yazdani (1999) show that although three quarters of aerospace companies and about two thirds of industries claim to use concurrent engineering to some extent, only just below one third of those interviewed said that they may have the ability to fully implement concurrent engineering across the entire company. This according to Haque and James -- Moore (2004) is due to a divergent approach to concurrent engineering's implementation that mainly focuses on improvement of integration, collaboration and compression of processing with a strong bias on technology while putting little emphasis on identification of value as well as efficiency of the product. In theirconclusion, they argue that in so much as the concurrent engineering tools and mechanism of organizations help to reduce waste resulting to leaner development processes Lean Product Development in addition to these puts emphasis on the significance of focusing on the identification of value coupled with creation of flow in the entire Product Development stream. Although the importance of defining value and managing flow in Product development has been shown as critical by several authors including (Baines et al., 2006; Browning,2003; Hines, Francis, and Found, 2006), the framework that has been proposed aims to integrate the various techniques and approaches that offer support to the process of optimizing both perspectives at all levels. This framework also tries to incorporate different ways of defining value while at the same time describing techniques that can be used for internal prioritization and ensure coordination is achieved and assured at all levelsused in Lean Product development,

For one to easily understand the different approaches used in the Lean product development suggested by leading researchers in the field of New product development, first and foremost, one needs to do a comprehensive review of the literature on lean design engineering from Bianes et al. (2006). Secondly, one needs to understand the characteristics of the recent best past practice studies that have been carried out in the area of new product development (Cooper, 2008).

Motivation for this research

The efficiency of process must not only be gauged by the level of waster that is reduce or the level of advantages in terms of increase outputs but also with a consideration of other factors such as environmental and sustainability variables (Coelli,2003;2005).It is well-known that lean manufacturing techniques score poorly on environmental variables (Bergmiller,2006).

There is therefore a need to come up with a more elaborate study aimed at determining the 'true' efficiency of the lean manufacturing systems with a consideration of the other important variable of environment and sustainability. This is because there is a general gap in literature in this regard.

Conclusion

There is a need to develop a metric for measuring the efficiency of lean manufacturing but which takes into account the metrics of environment and sustainability