A review of designing machine tool for leanness

Abstract

As an ideology, Leanness is not a new concept but still researchers strive for developing new methods to reduce almost all kinds of identified wastages at almost every stage and in every activity — right from design till delivery of final product to the end-customer. Newly developed manufacturing ideologies, paradigms and systems are always critically examined from the point of view of leanness. In other words, leanness is becoming an important evaluation tool to compare the recently developed/pioneered approaches. There has been a gradual evolution of the leanness over the years from the shop floor level of a manufacturing (automobile) organization to almost every operational and management aspect now. The Leanness has undergone and still is undergoing a process of continuous and never-ending evolution due to its inherently built dynamic concept of continuous improvement. Although in the literature a lot of work has been reported to the application of lean tools, principles, theories and methodologies to production systems, but a very few is evident in the area of Lean design process of a product and machine tool. For this reason an attempt is being made here to focus a significant proportion of this paper on evolutionary aspect of leanness from manufacturing to design stage. Also, this paper reviews the concepts and practices being followed till date by the industrialists, researchers and academicians in applying lean tools and techniques in the design of product and machine tools along with the methods to measure the lean improvements in the systems.