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IMPROVING PRODUCTION PERFORMANCE THROUGH LEAN MANUFACTURING TECHNIQUES & EDUCATION IN LEAN CONCEPTS

Patricio A. Torres, M.B.A. Matthew P. Stephens, Ph.D.

Introduction

Manufacturing productivity can be improved by reducing waste in production processes.

Since the introduction of continuous flow and the concept of assembly line processing by Henry

Ford, the industrial world has experienced a tremendous number of changes and modifications

due to ever-increasing customer demands and expectations. These changes and growth have not

always followed a systematic approach and have not always been without the accompanying

growing pains. As a result, several significant problems have arisen. Companies have spent

millions of human activity hours, have required a lot of resources and have created products with

no value at all. Managers have made a countless number of costly mistakes which may have

required rectification. Factories have had a great deal of products that were neither needed nor

appreciated by the customer and this situation has resulted in overstock of inventories. All these

problems can be summarized in one word: Waste, what the Japanese manufacturers refer to as

“muda.”

For many years, there were several attempts to decrease this “muda.” The most

significant among these techniques are “lean thinking.”

With lean thinking, demand is anticipated and it is the engine that moves the entire

system. A factory works as one big synchronized machine in which each step of the production

Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright ⓒ 2005, American Society for Engineering Education

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Torres, P., & Stephens, M. (2005, June), Improving Production Performance Through Lean Manufacturing Techniques & Education In Lean Concepts Paper presented at 2005 Annual Conference, Portland, Oregon. 10.18260/1-2--15494