Manufactura lean

Manuel Conde
3/19/2011
2531311
IME-250
Lean Manufacturing
In this paper I am going to talk about lean manufacturing and seven very important concepts that go together with leanmanufacturing. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived from Toyota Production System. As it names states, lean manufacturing seeks to make production ‘leaner’. In that sense, in lean manufacturing,waste in the production line process is tried to be reduced to its minimum. Lean manufacturing defines waste as anything that is not of value for the customer. Any product or resourced that does notadds value to the final product is waste. Seven key concepts help understand lean manufacturing better, and make lean manufacturing work: muda, VMS, JIT, Heijunka, Poka-Yoke, Jidoka and 5s.
The firstbasic term that needs to be defined is Muda. Muda is the Japanese word for waste. As I stated before, the key goal in lean manufacturing is to eliminate waste from production. It is obvious that byreducing waste, efficiency is increased. In lean manufacturing, any activity or resource that does not add value to the final product is considered waste and it is tried to be eliminated. There areseven types of Mudas according to the Toyota Production System: overproduction, unnecessary transportation, inventory, motions, defects, over-processing, and waiting.
Poka-Yoke is a Japanese term thatmeans ‘fail-safing’ or ‘mistake-proofing’. A poka-yoke is any mechanism installed in the production line that helps humans to avoid errors. The goal of these mechanisms is to eliminate defects bypreventing or correcting errors as they occur. Poka-yoka mechanisms call the attention of the operator when something abnormal arises in the production line. Poka-Yoke can be implemented at any pointwhere something can go wrong in the production line. The term was originally baka-yoke, but since it means ‘idiot-proofing’ it was changed to the current one.
Jidoka is one also a very important...