Investigations on implementing lean production in wet grinder manufacturing industry

Abstract

Increased competition among companies forced manufacturing and service companies to adopt Lean Production (LP) to improve productivity, quality and customer satisfaction. Introducing lean principles in the manufacturing processes improves the efficiency of the processes by identifying and eliminating the seven wastes namely motion, inventory, waiting time, over-production, over-processing, defect and transportation. Even though by adopting LP, companies can reap benefits, implementation in some industries is yet to be investigated. One such industry identified is wet grinder manufacturing industry. The entry of many multi-nationals in the wet grinder manufacturing sector triggers the modern wet grinder manufacturing company to systematically enhance and optimize their manufacturing newlinesystems for me eting the customer expectations and retaining them. The significant problems faced by the wet grinder manufacturing companies are less productivity, high manufacturing costs and throughput time. During the beginning phase of the doctoral work being reported in this thesis, literature survey was conducted from two perspectives. In the first perspective, the researches on LP in manufacturing organizations were surveyed. From the second perspective, researches on LP implementation frameworks and models were surveyed. The primary finding of this survey was that very few researchers have so far investigated the implementation of newlineLP in wet grinder manufacturing industry. The secondary finding was that no model to implement LP in wet grinder manufacturing industry has so far been reported. newline newline