Lean Production for Enterprises with High Variety of Products

摘要

Lean Production has been appointed as a new accepted production paradigm by an increasing number of enterprises worldwide. Besides its origin at automotive industry, Lean Production concepts have been spreading along at practically all kinds of industries, not mattering the enterprises size. However, the use of these concepts at manufacturers of high variety of products and high variety of components has been reported as a challenging achievement and most practitioners would be discouraged to use this approach and consider using conventional MRP solutions. This paper proposes a Lean Production approach for this kind of enterprise. The presented method is based on Rother & Shook generic recommendations for future state design, but it also presents a proposal of product classification considering three factors: a) frequency of ordering for each product (high or low), b) average amount per order for each product (high or low) and, c) inventory maintenance cost for each product. This classification allows creating families of control systems and information flows besides the traditional families based on process flows. This paper also presents a successful application of this method at a high variety production company that produces automotive parts. Results obtained from this application are as well presented.