A Simulation Framework To Help In Lean Manufacturing Initiatives

Abstract

Lean Manufacturing initiatives try to understand where the sources of waste are in a manufacturing process in order to minimize or avoid them and to add value to the stakeholders. The improvement actions related to lean methods are always incremental, fast and easy; mainly based on people’s experience and on simple tools. For example, a Value Stream Map (VSM) is created to have a visual representation of the material and information ¤ows involved in the production process, allowing improvement teams to detect where is the waste introduced and where is the value added. The integration of simulation with VSM could considerably improve the results obtained in lean projects, helping the decision makers in adding dynamic information to the usually considered static pictures of the processes. The information obtained from what-if simulations allows to detect improvement opportunities, to prioritize them, to analyze the best implementation alternative, and to quantify the possible bene£ts of the proposed actions. This work presents the LeanSim framework, an easy to use tool based on Matlab and Simulink, capable of integrating a lean method such as VSM with simulation. Furthermore, a case study of an improvement project at a milk production plant is presented to illustrate the utilization of this new framework on a real environment.