ABSTRACT
Lean manufacturing is a systematic approach to identify and eliminate wastes.
Adopting lean manufacturing concepts has become inevitable. It can lead to many
advantages including higher efficiency, better responsiveness and flexibility, shorter
lead times, and lower rework and defect rates. This ultimately reduces the
production costs, and is appropriate for current business environment where it is
required to produce a portfolio of products with suitable production capacity.
This paper describes the process of transforming an assembly line to work with lean
concepts. A methodology has been developed and used as a framework to utilize
various lean manufacturing tools in analyzing configuration and performance of the
assembly line and identifying the present forms of waste and their causes. Wastes
included high levels of work-in-process that led to high defect rates, frequent
inability to meet production targets within regular capacity, lack of flexibility and
expensive change over between models were identified. Simulation models of the
modified (lean) assembly lines were built and used as management decision
support tools to investigate further modifications to the lean system.
Converting the assembly line into a lean production system led to cutting off work-inprocess
by about 82%, reducing cycle time by 30%, and decreasing model
changeover time from 127.5 min to 11.5 min, in addition, converting the lengthy
assembly line to two shorter and parallel assembly lines to produce two models
concurrently.