No abstract

In general, profitability and efficiency have been the main interest for organization. However, the increasing concerns for the environment from government, regulators, customers and other stakeholders has forced companies to seek for alternatives to achieve green objectives. The difficulties faced by organizations are lack of awareness and guideline in implementing green practices in their daily operation. Under constrained resources, employers are reluctant to spend money on something unclear. During the last decade, lean manufacturing seems to be visible trend in most of the manufacturing industries in Malaysia. As lean tends to emphasize on waste reduction, it provides similarity between lean and green. Therefore, it is a better atmosphere to deploy green practices and tools under existing lean manufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to present a review on the synergies between green and lean and identifying the determinants that affecting both lean and green manufacturing for Malaysian manufacturers. The determinant obtained are financial benefit, incentive, legislation, stakeholder, management commitment, technology, environmental awareness and brand image or competitiveness. Besides, the authors identified and suggested future research directions on developing an integrated lean-green model for daily operation. This study aims to assist researchers to identify the opportunities and challenges on lean-green model and this review is useful for manufacturers and government in developing manufacturing policies and guideline.

Nowadays, manufacturers in Malaysia as well as global have been facing challenges in order to overcome the uncertainty of demand fluctuations, supplier capability and achieved customer expectations and satisfaction. To increase competitiveness in global market, manufacturers from various aspects keep one’s eyes open on lean implementation and factory automation. This journal aims to develop an efficient production plans for heater manufacturing industry in order to achieve higher productivity and reduce wastes. With the traditional production line which had been implemented for years, several difficulties have been faced by company. For instance, abundance numbers of worker in production line which is not fully utilize and product quality is highly depends on skilled operators due to manual process. Smoothness index is used to determine the improvement of proposed production plan. Although minimization of smoothness index is essential in solving line balancing problem, this research has highlighted that researcher or company shall not rely on smoothness index alone while other aspect such as acceptable productivity and minimization of human resource should be considered.