A Lean Manufacturing Progress Model and Implementation for SMEs in the Metal Products Industry

Abstract

The manufacturing industry faces the challenge of small and diversified customer orders. To meet this challenge, strong internal production capabilities are required. A lean manufacturing process that uses fewer resources and offers greater process improvement will help SMEs to continue to contribute to the global economy. Though SMEs provide most employment opportunities, previous studies have focused on large companies in auto-manufacturing-related industries. With the commitment and support of the management, and the application of a value stream map (VSM) and related improvement tools, we produced a practical process improvement model for a lean manufacturing system in an SME. With the commitment and support of the management and the joint efforts of the project improvement staff, the 10 improvement projects over a six-month period all achieved their goals: reduction in lead time from 26 days to 19.5 days, improvement of welding per people per hour (PPH) efficiency by 28.3%, improvement of packaging PPH efficiency by 64.1%, improvement of working in process (WIP) efficiency at the production site by 83.84%, and improvement of raw material storage by 83.84%. The efficiency of the raw material warehouse inventory was improved by 58.63%, and the efficiency of the shipment completion rate was improved by 14.5%.

Algorithm for Process Innovation by Increasing Ideality

“…There are many cases where the improvement rate is much more significant, but it seems that these cases are not as often. These findings are based on the research of other authors such as [57][58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68]. Based on a comparison of the classical indicators, the change achieved in the process is slightly above average.…”

PDCA Method Implementation to Reduce the Potential Product Defects in the Automotive Components Industry

“…Plan Do Check Action (PDCA) is a continuous management method used to improve business processes through four steps: planning (plan), implementation (do), checking (check), and corrective action (action). PDCA is very popular in the automotive industry because of its systematic and easy-to-apply process in the production of automotive components (Dahniar et al, 2022;Huang et al, 2022;Nabiilah et al, 2018;Permana et al, 2021;Sunadi et al, 2020;Zhou et al, 2021). Several studies have been conducted to test the effectiveness of PDCA in reducing defects in automotive component production.…”

Internet of Things: Development Intelligent Programmable IoT Controller for Emerging Industry Applications

“…However, these six pillars exist as nomenclature explanations in the enterprise [ 20 ]. The essence of manufacturing remains the same: it must offer low-cost, high-quality, and short-delivery manufacturing capabilities to provide maximum value to customers, obtain orders, and improve the sustainable competitiveness of the company [ 21 ].…”