A framework for lean manufacturing implementation in Indian textile industry

Abstract

Lean Manufacturing is a philosophy of continuous improvement to eliminate waste. This paper is the result of a case study conducted in south India's textile industry. Although the concept of lean manufacturing has shown good results in continuous process industry, compared with discrete manufacturing industry it has not been extensively utilized. Process industry and particularly textile industry has highly inflexible automatic machinery with high volume/low product variety. This complexity of the textile industry renders the introduction of lean manufacturing strategies a challenge; hence, it has been taken up as a challenge to introduce lean techniques in a textile market. To enhance the processes we chose a mix of meaning stream mapping (VSM), 5S, kanban, kaizen, poka-yoke, and visual controls. Potential levels of accomplishment prior to and after lean adoption were demonstrated using radar diagrams. The findings of this study show that a thorough analysis of the operation, set-up and changeover time (CO), the use of color coding for volume-mix recognition, the use of kaizen and the consistency circles that inspire the workers are some of the different keys to an effective lean implementation in a textile industry.