Abstract
Many manufacturing cost reduction initiatives have been introduced over past three decades including lean manufacturing. Waste reduction and efficiency improvement are the main objectives of this initiative. It is developed from a set of tools and techniques and can fit nicely in cost focus or cost leadership competitive advantage strategies. But, keeping competitive advantage under the market circumstances are getting harder with growth of production quantity and product diversity. Therefore, paper's focus is lean manufacturing implementation trends and issues within the various manufacturing sector. Successes and failures of implementation of lean manufacturing in some industries are discussed. It was found that lean principles are good source of competitive advantage, it is applicable for many industries and its expansion and discussion are significantly progressing. The biggest threat in implementing lean is lack of understanding the concept but those who engage consultants were more successful.
Highlights
The future of the manufacturing industry is the lean manufacturing and lean practice is one of the best methods used by manufactures around the world to increase their competitiveness [1]
It was found that lean principles are good source of competitive advantage, it is applicable for many industries and its expansion and discussion are significantly progressing
Lean manufacturing is a successor of Toyota Production System (TPS)
Summary
The future of the manufacturing industry is the lean manufacturing and lean practice is one of the best methods used by manufactures around the world to increase their competitiveness [1]. Lean manufacturing is set of methods and techniques developed by engineers of Toyota and it is very popular in today’s world companies to increase value of product though waste elimination. As many companies from many fields try to implement lean, the popularity of lean increases lately, so do number of publications. It is expected that a slight increase of publications will appear It means lean manufacturing will remain as a popular topic in following years too. Rodolfo de Castro analyses Environmental and Information Technologies (ET&IT) in the capability of Lean Manufacturing (LM) to achieve improved industrial performance In their study, they tested hypotheses in a multi-sectoral sample of 763 factories among 5 European countries. This issue makes the application even harder and unsatisfying at the end of the production, because lean manufacturing becomes stronger and reliable as we use most of the elements[17]
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