Lean Approach to Enhance Manufacturing Productivity: A Case Study of Saudi Arabian Factory

摘要

In a present competitive market, manufacturing industries are compelled to follow a systematic approach to understandand improve manufacturing plant performance. A variety of management tools and philosophies are adopted by differentindustries to identify areas of opportunity for minimization of waste and maximization of production productivity. Leanmanufacturing is a philosophy of waste minimization, productivity enhancement and continuous improvement. This paperconsiders Saudi Arabian factory as a case study. Accordingly, an approach is presented to measure the manufacturing plantperformance and total productivity. Productivity benchmarking is done based on baseline productivity, and manufacturingplant performance index. The detailed case study analysis is done by gathering data from different manufacturing departments.By adopting lean approach, the manufacturing industry was able to improve its performance in each manufacturingdepartments. After improvement, the whole manufacturing plant performance index improved from 0.77 to 0.86, and the totalfactor productivity is increased by 11.45%. This case study focuses on resources utilization, man and material movements,production bottlenecks and percentage rejection. Thus, this paper is about the application of lean tools in a company and proposingan approach to apply it in Saudi Arabian factory, and the results can be applied to any other manufacturing company.