Lean Six Sigma Applied to Manufacturing Capacity Increase Project – Case Study 2008-36-0166

Nowadays, auto-parts companies spend a lot of efforts in trying to improve their manufacturing performance, which can be easily explained by the influence of many competitors, and also due to strong pressure besides their costumers to reduce prices of their products. Normally, the investments to buy new machines and contract new labors to respond customer demands gets lower as day goes by, due to this, the manufacturing team must use the best techniques available to get the maximum of their manufacturing system in an effort to meet flexibility, by the way, there is a constant effort to eliminate waste and variation in manufacturing system, for such work, many companies have adopted lean manufacturing principles in order to eliminate waste as a good response to produce more with less, and aligned with this thinking, Six Sigma methodology comes to add to lean manufacturing a robust way to eliminate variation on manufacturing process. So, this paper has per objective to show based on case study in a manufacturing assembly cell to show how the DMAIC methodology powered by Six Sigma and Lean techniques can work together to provide strong and robust results, as an way to increase manufacturing capacity without spend money unnecessary and show how to turn stronger Kaizen activities in current production lines.