LEAN MANUFACTURING CONCEPT IN METALLURGICAL INDUSTRY

Blast-furnace procedure belongs to the most demanding manufacturing processes. It poses great claims on the input raw materials, process run regulation, as well as on the utilized volume of human capacity ensuring the process is running efficiently. Continuous increase of prices of all input materials forces the metallurgical companies to increase the efficiency of the entire process. The competitive power of the manufacturing system can be realized using a number of modern approaches. Initially, the lean manufacturing concept was applied in mass production of automobiles. However, its versatility and efficiency meant it has expanded to other industrial branches. Lean manufacturing concept utilization can bring significant savings in the metallurgical industry branch which will help the companies to compensate for the increasing prices of raw-materials. Lean manufacturing system application can find wide use in metallurgical manufacturing, above all in combination with TMP method - Total Productive Maintenance. This method represents part of organization production philosophy which includes all the company departments and it introduces mutual interconnection of maintenance, manufacturing with technical provisions for construction and technology. TPM tries to remove the traditional division of employees into those who work with the given equipment and those who are responsible for maintenance. It is caused by the fact that it is the worker who uses the production equipment and he the first one who can spot functional irregularities of the machine and the eventual sources of future breakdowns. The largest possible number of diagnostic and maintenance activities is transferred from maintenance department directly into production, within the frame of TPM. Great importance of this concept utilization can be seen mainly in current problems of metallurgical companies when financing separate maintenance is very costly. TPM concept in metallurgical production can be naturally connected with continuous improvement process utilization which has currently been very popular in manufacturing companies. The article deals with analysis of utilization of these methods in metallurgical production processes.