Eliminating waste and producing products on time can reduce costs and meet customer needs
Manufacturers can draw on tried and tested practices that companies have used to streamline processes to raise profits and increase market share.
Eiji Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and Shigeo Shingo of Japan's Toyota Motor Corp, first developed lean manufacturing techniques in the mid-20th century, that delivered systematic approaches to reducing waste by minimising production and removing needless parts of a process, thus fitting the product as closely as possible to the customer's vision.
Lean manufacturing provides companies with a proactive response to challenges, in an industry where 'clean' has become closely tied to 'cost-effective', and where sustainable development has improved industrial efficiency.
'To initiate a lean manufacturing process in a company, one should understand customer order patterns,' said Winco Yung, associate professor at Polytechnic University's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.
'These include sales forecasts, actual production that goes back three months, current production forecasts, long-term agreements and interviews with customers. By applying an appropriate lean manufacturing system, an enterprise can easily manage manufacturing processes with high efficiency, improve the accuracy of planning, reduce costs and greatly improve quality throughout.'