A novel approach to lean control for Taiwan-funded enterprises in mainland China

Abstract

The lean control approach has been successfully applied to reduce waste and improve customer service in numerous Taiwan-funded enterprises. Although numerous models have been developed to overcome its limitations, such as determining unnecessary moving, unnecessary inventory, and redundant transportation, they do not, however, identify focused stages in which to start lean control. To secure Taiwan-Funded Enterprises in Mainland China (TFEMC), in this paper, after using value stream mapping (VSM) to show the current state of manufacturing processes, rough set theory is adopted and used to identify types of focused stages, where lean controls are most required. A generalised label-correcting algorithm is then developed to determine the desired stages of lean manufacturing, which are difficult to show in the VSM. This methodology is suitable for a repetitive manufacturing environment of mixed type, i.e., job shop and flow shop, and achieves the following objectives: 1. Decreasing work in progress (WIP) inventory. 2. Reducing inventory and logistics cost globally. The approach is novel and the illustrated case could be a role model of TFEMC because different types of problems can be solved with one algorithm; the reduct rules can be inducted to determine focus stages efficiently; and waste is reduced from the viewpoint of system thinking.