The Lean Manufacturing Process

INTRODUCTION

Most manufacturing companies are currently encountering a necessity to respond to the rapid changing of customer desires and tastes. For companies, to remain competitive and retain market share in this global market, continuous improvement of production system processes has become a necessity in each company. Competition continuously increasing standards for customer satisfaction purposes has proven to be the infinity driver of organizations performance.

Lean manufacturing is one of the best solution for production systems in various industries Reichhart and Holweg (2007). Lean manufacturing consists of lean tools such as 5S ,Kaizen, TQM , lean thinking and lean training (Lanigan, 2004; Ramakrishnan & Testani, 2010). Kaizen

(Demeter, & Matyusz, 2011), That is, doing what may be done in the company, with the current resources exist at hand , Use properly all of the team‘s knowledge. The experts are frequently can be found on the factory floors, disregard rank of them. All team members are equal to each other and everyone has something to contribute within the process. Kaizen fundamentally contrasts from traditional models of continuous improvement processes because it is almost entirely action-based procedure. Teams are supported and charging with both developing and implementing their solutions; they create processes or change existing processes for the better one, and placing new process in to the system. Team members are not just planning , they even clean equipment, sorting tools, moving the machines within the bounds of safety, reassemble, rebuild, and run the process to the goal. Normally rank of the organization is not recognized—factory managers and company officers work all together with machine operators to find the best solution and implement the best of their ideas. The team‘s ultimate goal is to make changes happen and to create value and replace a new way of doing things with old ones (Chenhall,

Existing literature shows that when lean practices are already implemented concurrently, the final performance effect will exceed the sum of performance effect on individual lean best practices (Shah and Ward, 2003). While some recent studies (e.g., Furlan et al., 2011a) have empirically tested the synergy among lean practice bundles, these analyses were restricted to specific aspects of lean manufacturing and focused on plant-level performance. In the study, this research will address concerns of potential common method biases (Podsakoff et al., 2003) that may occur when lean manufacturing and performance data are provided by the same survey respondent by using financial performance metrics along with primary survey data on lean manufacturing implementation with more focus on Kaisen and continues improvement