Applying Lean Principles to Production Scheduling

When exploring the Lean issue, literature appears to have countless definitions to describe that individual topic, causing misinterpretations between academics and professionals alike. The mainstream Lean implementation ventures are merely a compilation of tools and methods that are forced down the organisational hierarchy from higher tiers, due to other organisations publicising lean in improving their enterprise‟s effectiveness and efficiency. However, lean implementations have often undesirable outcomes. Firstly, organisations either do not achieve the levels of success they initially yearned. This leads to management either deserting their lean efforts or seeking aimlessly for a new buzz word to adopt. Secondly, an enterprise may find it difficult to sustain the lean improvements, and thus rushing to conclude lean as incompatible with their industry, or unsuited for their organisational structure. These shortcomings can be easily avoided by recognising lean not only as a collection of tools but also a philosophy. The Lean philosophy needs to be applied companywide, with both management and employees onboard, to tackle business issues as they arise with a united way of thinking. In turn, this means that when opportunities or problems occur, and traditional lean tools fail short, the shared way of thinking by the organisation can be used to derive and develop new tailored solutions to address the issue directly. This paper aims to illustrate the possibilities of lean tools being applied in complex production environment, and introduce two case studies supporting the findings. In particular, we argue that the full potential of planning and scheduling in a manufacturing setting can only benefit from the utilisation of lean principles and the support of quantitative modelling.