Challenges Of Lean Manufacturing

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Lean manufacturing provides the promise of becoming more competitive in the 21st century by decreasing lead time, increasing quality, reducing cost and increasing customer satisfaction. As a matter of fact, lean is becoming more prevalent and part of most manufacturing practices. “Besides total quality management, supply chain management, and innovation & technology management, lean manufacturing strategy has been recognized as one of the most efficient and effective global operation strategies" (1). The principles of Lean manufacturing have become visible in many industries ranging from auto makers, to hospitals to mom and pop shops. A 2010 Compensation Data Manufacturing survey revealed that 69.7 percent of manufacturing companies utilize …show more content…

The goal of lean is to do more with what you have. Improved processes, faster cycle time and setup time, increased equipment uptime, and greater production velocity usually free up capacity.
3. Challenges
The biggest challenge for today’s transportation managers is how to orchestrate an end-to-end process, while managing the interplay of various third-parties, such as customers, suppliers, ocean carriers, freight forwarders, customs brokers, government agencies, which in summary means achieving the best lead time for the flow of the goods through a network of Distribution Centers (DC's) to reach all the necessary nodes or locations within the supply chain.
Applying Lean to the management of flow, network and nodes will positively impact and enhance the effective use of time, space, routing and ensuring a competitive edge by:
• Reducing the frozen capital and assets by managing the flow: An optimized transportation time will impact directly in the level of inventory needed to ensure the service rate – hence less inventory building, less inventory holding and reduced depreciation …show more content…

Lean Solutions
Bringing control, visibility and delivery stability to the full network by designing and implementing Lean to distribution processes reduces lead time, releases financial stress by enabling a high inventory turnover and ultimately reduces the cost to the total supply chain output.
By approaching the waste focus areas mentioned above with Lean solutions, some of the opportunities for improvement and benefits in transportation include:
 Increase of the inventory turnover.
 Information reliability to coordinate the supply chain.
 Reduction in transportation lead times by optimizing route planning.
 Increase the total supply chain visibility.
 Enabling a locally, regionally and globally integrated management process.
 Increased flexibility to approach and subdue ever changing market conditions and client specifications with making as little further investments as needed to achieve it.
We implement Lean Solutions in distribution functions in a similar way to other supply chain solutions fitting the challenges without sacrificing quality, decreasing lead-time and significantly reducing

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