Abstract
In recent years, the Toyota Production System has also assumed in western manufacturing plants a predominant position. Lean Manufacturing, as it is usually called in the occidental world, aims at a “Single-piece-flow” job handling and has its advantages compared to the classic “Batch and Queue” job handling. On the other hand, mathematical Linear Programming optimization techniques have passed into oblivion, having obtained the feel to be inappropriate for production planning. Although the two approaches have different aims and application, they give particular attention to scarce resources. The concepts of “bottleneck” in Lean Manufacturing and “shadow price” in Linear Programming are complementary. The paper shows the different focus of the two approaches and crystallizes their synergic values.
Highlights
In the seventies and eighties Operations Research (OR), the branch of mathematics dealing with optimization problems, became very popular
In other words: In Linear Programming (LP) the products of the mix xn may be produced in n big batches or could be produced in several batches for each product xn according to the economic batch quantity Bopt; this corresponds to a clear push manufacturing philosophy without dedicated resources
This shows that Lean is a toolset but primarily a management philosophy of continuous improvement. Both approaches have the same rational to focus on the bottleneck of production to increase the output function
Summary
In the seventies and eighties Operations Research (OR), the branch of mathematics dealing with optimization problems, became very popular. Increasing computational power helped to spread the technique into the offices of multinational enterprises. (2015) Discourse about Linear Programming and Lean Manufacturing: Two Differ‐ ent Approaches with a Similar, Converging Rational. Lack of realistic practicability prevailed over the illusion of being able to optimize socio-economic systems with the computer. After the spreading of the Toyota Production System (TPS) in America and Europe, which became popular with the name of Lean Manufacturing (LM), production has put the emphasis rather on cost savings and waste reduction (Muda) and continuous improvement (Kaizen) than on overall margin optimization. Modern production planning systems have other, more practical optimization functions than the valid but theoretical maximizing margin contribution approach. We will analyze the peculiarities of each approach and show the dichotomic characteristics of both optimization techniques
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