Lean Manufacturing Essay

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ESTERLINE TECHNOLOGIES: • What evidence does the case offer regarding Esterline´success? Facilities with decentralized responsibility for different functional areas (engineering, production, marketing, sales, …) Strategy: Lean Manufacturing – Minimize waste; use resources to create added value to end customer – Just In Time and autonomation and/or standardization; Process simplification; centered in production; give some responsibility to operating level employees => lower costs, improve quality, create barriers to entry; Set annual goals by business unit: profitable growth, ROI From… Jumble Flows (people/machines/resources organized by function – adv: high utilization of resources; disadv: create long lead times, complex – IT support is needed) To… Families (people/machines organized in cells arranged sequentially, typical of LEAN System • How does lean differ from more traditional approaches to production ? Traditional manufacturing methods: developed during the age of mass production, focused on economies of scale and massive machine utilization => Goals : Customer satisfaction is achieved by maintaining large inventories in anticipation of customer orders, and to reduce the unit cost. "Batch and Queue" Process - Parts are made in batches and upon completion they are moved and placed into a queue where they wait for the next operation to become available. Main problems with this practice: • machine set-up times define the length of the production run time. : • A product encounters a combination of three things during a process: 1. Its moved. 2. Its processed. 3. Its waiting. Studies have shown that in a traditional business, during the total time taken for a product to go through the manufacturing process it moves or waits 95% of the time. Its only processed for 5% of the total lead time. This leads to: • Difficulty when trying to

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