Improvement of refinery maintenance and mechanical services: application of lean manufacturing principles

Improvement of steel melting operations at a Caribbean company: a lean manufacturing approach

“…Moreover, Khamis et al (2009) demonstrated the use of 5S checklist for better housekeeping in terms of preserving health, safety and environment in a manufacturing firm. Further, by implementing 5S principles, the levels of quality, lead time, and cost reduction can be improved (Gadzik, 2009;Chowdary and George, 2012;Kumar et al, 2014;Srinivasan et al, 2016;Chowdary et al, 2016;Setianto and Haddud, 2016;Sajan et al, 2017;Chowdary et al, 2018).…”

“…Lasa et al (2008) have proved that VSM is a key lean tool for redesign of a production system. Furthermore, VSM tool has assisted a manufacturing company to envisage the process wastes and the ways of reducing them (Chowdary and George, 2012;Chowdary et al, 2016Chowdary et al, , 2018. In summary, VSM is a qualitative decision support tool which can determine how organisations should run.…”

“…• VSM tool has been used in several instances to map the current state of the system and then quality tools applied to identify sources of waste as well as lean strategies were successfully deployed to eliminate or reduce the wastes (Chowdary and George, 2012;Chowdary et al, 2016;Bevilacqua et al, 2017;Dhiravidamani et al, 2018;Chowdary et al, 2018).…”

“…• For reduction of process wastes, various LM tools such as 5S, PS, TPM, super market concept, setup time reduction, etc. are implemented widely across variety of industries (Abdullah, 2003;Gadzik, 2009;Monden, 2012;Srinivasan et al, 2016;Bevilacqua et al, 2017;Chowdary et al, 2018).…”

“…In order to protect market competition, companies are striving to increase manufacturing productivity and improve product quality in whatever way they can. Lean manufacturing (LM) is one such initiative where companies focus on elimination of process wastes to reduce overall cost of production (Watson, 2006;Bhasin and Burcher, 2006;Ruffa, 2008;Wan and Chen, 2008;García-Alcaraz et al, 2014;Chowdary et al, 2016;Bevilacqua et al, 2017;Chowdary et al, 2018). The application of LM tools and techniques have been spanned several sectors such as automotive, textiles, pharmaceutical and food manufacturing by showing variety of benefits to the organisations (Upadhye et al, 2010;Chowdary and George, 2012;Ghosh, 2013;Kumar et al, 2014;Yusup et al, 2016;Srinivasan et al, 2016;Setianto and Haddud, 2016;Sajan et al, 2017;Tortorella and Fettermann, 2018;Dhiravidamani et al, 2018).…”