Lean planning in the semi-process industry, a case study

The lean approach is an idealizing improvement approach that has an enormous impact in the field of Operations Management. The approach is basically very process oriented and there was less attention first for planning and control, this being the profession of dealing with all kind of non-ideal manufacturing and supply-chain restrictions. During the last years, however, planning and control have been integrated in the lean approach, leading to the concept of lean planning. Cyclic schedules form an important element of lean planning, certainly in the (semi-) process industry. The concept of lean planning is rather influential in practice already. This paper describes a lean planning case study in a semi-process production plant. The case study in itself is interesting and illustrates well how lean planning can be applied. The case study shows also that the effect of lean planning or, more specifically, the effect of a cyclic schedule cannot be isolated from the effect of supporting organizational measures and from the effect of the whole improvement process. And these effects are very context dependent. The case study helps to articulate the complexity of developing the lean approach into a theory of production management and production planning. It shows that it is impossible to predict the performance of the “leaned” system.