Abstract

With Small to Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in North America offering customized products to compete with low-cost offerings of off-shore manufacturers, their production systems often produce a high mix of products in low volumes. With an objective to improve competitiveness of such SMEs, this thesis develops a framework for lean application in High-Mix Low-Volume (HMLV) production systems and demonstrates its application in a real-life case study. In the developed framework, routing and demand forecasts are first used to select a product family that delivers the highest value. Value stream mapping is then utilized to map process cell data, information flow and material flow. Takt time is measured prior to process and flow kaizen led waste elimination. Next, a continuous flow cell is designed and a pacemaker is selected. A weighted average of total work content is used to define resource requirements, a ‘schedule to capacity’ concept is developed to enable mix scheduling and a concept of ‘dynamic pitch’ is introduced to ensure adherence to schedule. Finally, flow based FIFO lanes and pull based supermarkets are assigned to institute inventory leveling and therefrom construct, the future value stream. This thesis also uses linear programming to construct an optimized preventive maintenance schedule that improves uptime and an optimized ‘revenue-leveled’ schedule that institutes a ‘daily financial pitch’. A real-life case study of a HMLV manufacturer in the Architectural Lighting Industry is presented. Lead time improvements of 33% to 60% and processing time improvements of 58% to 79% are achieved in addition to changeover, uptime and yield improvements.