Abstract—In the present days, manufacturing industries face many problems due to the increase in waste and non value added work. To compete globally, one has to understand the customers need exactly and always maintain a higher quality standard. Lean Manufacturing concept is to reduce the waste and add value to every process in manufacturing. To survive in today’s global market, manufacturers need to find various methods to reduce both time and cost for making a product. Higher quality, Flexibility and Efficient production requires newer ideas in production. Lean Manufacturing Techniques are used to implement such new ideas into the production line to improve the overall production process. Failure Mode Effective Analysis (FMEA) and Value Stream Mapping (VSM) are lean approaches that find direct solution to these problems. Identification of failure and non value added work in the production line was carried out. This paper analyses waste and non value added work on the production floor and generates the necessary action plan to improve the performance. Production floor was observed for three months and the data was taken as inputs for FMEA and VSM. The results show that lean manufacturing can be effectively used to improve performance on production floor.

Index Terms—Lean manufacturing, FMEA, RPN, VSM, Current state, Future state

Cite: G Vinoth and S Raghuraman, "Lean Engineering Principles: An Effective Way to Improve Performance and Process on Production Floor," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol.2 No.3, pp. 129-136, July 2013.