Production line analysis via value stream mapping: a lean manufacturing process of color industry

Lean Manufacturing (LM) is a business strategy that was developed in Japan. The main role of lean manufacturing is to determine as well as to eliminate the waste. Companies implement LM to keep their competitiveness over their competitors by improving the manufacturing system's productivity and quality enhancement of the product. The goal of this paper is to apply one of the most significant lean manufacturing techniques called Value Stream Mapping (VSM) to improve the production line of a color industry as a case of study. To achieve this goal, lean fundamental principles was implemented to construct VSM for identification and elimination of wastes by using team formation, product selection, conceptual design, and time-frame formulation through takt time calculation. Based on the future VSM, final results showed that by implementing some lean thinking techniques, Production Lead-time (PLT) decreased from 8.5 days to 6 days, and the value added time decreased from 68 minutes to 37 minutes. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by ELsevier B.V.