World Class Manufacturing – the Concept for Performance Increasement and Knowledge Acquisition

Although the term World Class Manufacturing (WCM) is known long ago, it finds out its applicationeven today especially in production organizations. WCM still has one major advantage over thecurrently well-known and widespread concepts for process optimization such as lean production, JIT,six sigma, SCM, and TQM. While these concepts are generally focused on the achievement of speedand quality of the processes, WCM represents in its title, among other things, the target set by thesenior management that the employees in the organization have to strive for.In the paper, the implementation of the WCM concept will be presented based on the example of asupplier for the automotive industry in the Slovak republic, and what benefits this implementation hasbrought to this supplier.In principle, the introduction of the WCM concept is realized through the application of thosemethods and tools, as they are currently known from lean management and lean production concepts,like TPM and OEE, SMED, pull system, continuous flow, visual management, 5S, Zero QualityControl, etc.. However, because of the limited space in this case study, just the introduction of 5Smethod will be described. In the end of the paper, the knowledge acquisition through the case study of5S implementation will be described.