A Review on Lean Manufacturing Implementation Techniques

The concept of lean manufacturing was developed for maximizing the resource utilization through minimization of waste, later on lean was formulated in response to the fluctuating and competitive business environment. Due to rapidly changing business environment the organizations are forced to face challenges and complexities. Any organization whether manufacturing or service oriented to survive may ultimately depend on its ability to systematically and continuously respond to these changes for enhancing the product value. Therefore value adding process is necessary to achieve this perfection; hence implementing a lean manufacturing system is becoming a core competency for any type of organizations to sustain. The majority of the study focuses on single aspect of lean element, only very few focuses on more than one aspect of lean elements, but for the successful implementation of lean the organisation had to focuses on all the aspects such as Value Stream Mapping (VSM),Cellular Manufacturing (CM), U-line system, Line Balancing, Inventory control, Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED), Pull System, Kanban, Production Levelling etc., In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop a lean route map for the organization to implement the lean manufacturing system. Analyses of the exploratory survey results are summarized in this paper to illustrate the implementation sequence of lean elements in volatile business environment and the finding of this review was synthesized to develop a unified theory for implementation of lean elements. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.