Productivity improvements using lean practices at Japanese electrical and electronics manufacturing

Abstract

Nowadays, many companies around the world are struggling to deal with market and demand uncertainty. Unstable demand, poor economic scenario and high operational cost may worsen the company performance and insisting company to slow down its new model development and funding other Research and Development (R&D) activities. In order to remain alive and thrive in such a competitive global market, companies are now shifting to lean production in order to increase daily productivity output, reduce lead time, reduce operational cost either direct and indirect cost and improve quality thus providing the up most value to customer. In this study, investigation towards lean implementation at Japanese electrical and electronics manufacturing plant in Senai, Johor. The main problem statement in this project is to identify and eliminate non-value-added activities that may lead to high production lead time and low production efficiency thus unfulfilled production daily output demand. Lean assessment is used to measure leanness level at respective production. Then Visual Stream Mapping both current state and future is developed to identify, analyze and eliminated Non Value Added waste using appropriate lean tools. Finally, several process improvement solution is proposed and implement at respective production line.