Given recent increases in global competition, scarce resources, and fluctuating economies, it is not surprising that lean production has become critical to the long-term survival of today’s manufacturing organizations. Lean is a management philosophy focused on identifying and eliminating waste throughout a product’s entire value stream, extending not onlywithin theorganization but also along t...

The main objective of this research is to investigate whether or not Lean Production tools can help reduce the environmental impacts of manufacturing companies. The research is based on empirical observation inside five European companies that manufacture motorcycle components and which are also committed to Lean and environmental management. The environmental impacts of the production processe...

Lean production, which has revolutionary production management and practice manner, is the third milestone of human industrialization history. Its key point is to eliminate waste in all aspects of a firm’s production activities through establishing production system with high agility. It represents the tendency of modern manufacturing industry. It has been credited as the standard production ma...

Lean Manufacturing concept is well described in the literature in the context of low-mix high-volume production. There are numerous case studies proving outstanding benefits of implementation Lean principles. Nowadays enterprises have to face the problem of high variety of products and dynamically changing demand. Lean tools and methods known from repetitive production do not always fit to high...

This article deals with the specification of basics Lean Manufacturing principles that should help to designing lean production solutions for own applications. The 9 principles discussed in this paper are: continuous flow; lean machines simplicity; workplace organization; parts presentation; reconfigurability; product quality; maintainability; ease of access; and ergonomics. The presented artic...

Lean techniques are having a major impact on aerospace manufacturing. However, the cost and value of aerospace (and many other) products is determined primarily in product development. Migrating lean to engineering processes is ongoing in the industry, and a subject of study at the MIT Lean Aerospace Initiative. This paper summarizes findings to date, with references to both research literature...

Physical factory layout redesigns or changes of the supply chain infrastructure involve high costs. Through simulation and value stream mapping, managers can see the impacts before the implementation and transform the organization into a lean one at minimal cost. In this paper, we investigate some relevant lean manufacturing literature where lean principles and tools are presented or utilized. ...

This paper presents metamodelling method as a practical approach to the statistical summarisation of simulation results. Metamodels enable to reduce memory requirements by experiments and, on the other side, they can be use as fast support tools for the manufacturing systems control. The chosen metamodelling approach was applied in various projects. Given example shows practically how can be me...

The term “lean manufacturing”, (Womack et al., 1990), refers to the generalization of the Toyota Production system (TPS), also called Just-in-Time (JIT). One feature of such system is the reduction of costs through elimination of waste (Sugimori et al., 1977). Waste or muda (in Japanese) is anything that does not add value to a product. Elimination of muda is done by means of continuous improve...