Lean Manufacturing. Through Management of Labour and Machine Flexibility

      Аннотация: Today the manufacturing companies are facing a fierce competition and are under a pressure to customer delight by cutting cost and enhance quality by minimizing the waste through implementing lean manufacturing. In today’s manufacturing systems where production is carried out in small lots entailing a large number of set up changeovers, flexible machines and labour are absolutely necessary. Therefore industry must be focused on the management of flexibility of machines and labour for the attainment of lean manufacturing. Companies also hesitate to implement lean manufacturing in a single stage due to their limitations of resources and some practical constraints. So, all measures/actions cannot be implemented simultaneously at the same time because of resource, cost and time constraints faced by most of the companies to implement lean manufacturing. Thus a phase-wise approach is developed to overcome the constraints and at the same time determine the order in which various measures should be acquired to achieve lean manufacturing.

Ключевые слова: Lean Manufacturing, Phase-wise approach, Manufacturing Flexibility, Labour and Machine Flexibility