Integration of Lean Concepts and Line balancing Focusing on Value Adding Activities

Abstract

Lean manufacturing method is widely used in industrial organizations to reduce waste activities and achieve their objectives. The most kinds of waste found in the industry are, inadequate processing, excessive transport, unnecessary movement, defective, waiting, unnecessary inventory, and overproduction they may lead to Non-value added wastes, long lead time in production, and poor productivity. In this research, an integrated methodology using lean concepts and line balancing is adopted, by presenting lean concepts in the leather shoes manufacturing industry in the city of Baghdad by using software tools, and the model is generated by Arena simulation. The research aimed to decrease lead time, minimize the Non-value activity and improve the productivity of the leather shoe manufacturing industry. Based on the observation and interview in the production department the process chart was identified and the Yamazumi chart is developed to measure the state of line balancing to found the bottlenecks of the processes in the industry and match the production rate to the takt time. After adopting the suggested improvement the Non-value added time has been reduced by 36%, therefore the total production cycle time decreased by 31%, and the productivity has been improved by 43%.