AN OPTIMAL SOLUTION THROUGH LEAN MANUFACTURING USING VALUE STREAM MAPPING TOWARDS EFFICIENT PRODUCTION FOR A WORLD- CLASS AUTOMOBILE BRAKES MANUFACTURING COMPANY 2009-28-0054

Today, numerous companies have a major opportunity to reduce their costs and customer lead time and cycle time through the application of Lean Manufacturing processes. In recent years, almost every manufacturing industry has been trying to get ‘lean’. Lean thinking represents a set of principles and techniques for the identification and elimination of wastages in manufacturing and administrative processes. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) which is one of the lean manufacturing approaches has emerged as the preferred way to support and implement the lean approach. VSM is a helpful tool to identify the waste and improvement areas. VSM enables a company to see the entire process in both its current and desired future state, and develop the road map that prioritises the projects or tasks to bridge the gap between the current state and the future (lean) state. Improvements in processes, facility layouts, and managerial spans of control encourage redefining an organizations hierarchy and adopting a value stream management system. In this work, the Information flow, Current state, Value added time and Non-value added time across a leading automobile brakes manufacturing company and its Subcontractors have been studied to achieve value stream management or lean organizational structures. A future state has been proposed in which the reduction of raw material inventory, WIP inventory, finished goods inventory and Lead Time. This paper describes the value stream analysis from current state mapping to future state mapping including the lean concepts, metrics and methods that provide improvement. Eventually the current state and future state have been compared to propose an optimal manufacturing system.