Remanufacturing: Challenges and Opportunities to be Lean

The lean philosophy, which denotes business excellence through continuous improvement, originates from Japanese car manufacturer Toyota’s Production System (TPS). An area where lean is not fully explored is remanufacturing, a business that brings used products back to useful life. Remanufacturing is often a more complex process than manufacturing due to uncertainty of process steps/time and part quality/quantity. This paper has explored remanufacturing by revealing its challenges and opportunities to be lean. The identified challenges to work with lean do not overcome the advantages of a lean remanufacturing system. Even though some researches state that it is difficult or even impossible to apply lean to remanufacturing, this research recovers lean as a continuous improvement philosophy that not only works for manufacturing but also for remanufacturing.