Lean and agile manufacturing for work-in-process (WIP) control

Abstract

To become a world class organisation, the basic requirements of any manufacturing company are Cycle time reduction, lower manufacturing cost and minimal inventory. To compete in the digital and dynamic world, the lean and agile manufacturing play a vital role to uplift the production process. Lean manufacturing prioritise the value addition by eliminating the repetitive, null valued processes in the manufacturing cycle. Agile manufacturing supports optimization, standardisation and automation of the development processes. The purpose of Lean and agile manufacturing is the customer satisfaction with a cost-effective price. The role of lean and agile manufacturing is vital to maintain the optimum work in process inventory in the production flow. In the present work, the concept of lean and agile manufacturing is applied in the boiler component fabrication work, where the aim is to determine the factors affecting the Work-In-Process (WIP) inventory levels to meet the required demand for each product. The decision variables are identified and their effects are analysed. The analysis is focused on root cause of the problem, fundamental problems associated with the systems, implementation of Kanban, inventory cost, reorder point etc. The work provides methodologies to minimize the total WIP inventory across all elements of the boiler component.