Abstract – For any Company’s economy, the industry cost, production time, total quality management and waste reduction have great impact. The investments consumed by the company by eradicating non value added production work and time are very important. Focusing on these points Lean Manufacturing tools, a Japanese strategy, is implemented in this work. An apparel industry was studied and the bottleneck areas were identified through Value Stream Mapping (VSM). The bottleneck areas were identified and eliminated by implementing line balancing and parallel working section. The implementation of kaizen resulted in reduction of cycle time by 48.7%.

Keywords – Lean Manufacturing, Value Stream Mapping, Kaizen, Line Balancing, Garment.

I. INTRODUCTION

Lean often referred as Lean Manufacturing or Production which is the systematic method to eliminate waste in any manufacturing unit. From the customer‟s perspective “value” is the process for which the client would be willing to pay for any product or service. Lean manufacturing is a philosophy which has been derived from Toyota Production System in 1990s and identified as “Lean”. Toyota Production System is mainly focused on reduction of seven wastes to improve customer‟s overall value. Lean is an essential tool for which it adds value by reducing everything else.Lean is a tool which helps to identify and eliminate waste. By eliminating the waste it improves the quality while the cost and production time are reduced.

A list of such tools includes: 5S, SMED, Multiprocess handling, Rank order clustering, Poka-yoke, Value Stream Mapping, Redesigning working cells, Kaizen, Kanban, Elimination of time batching, Single point scheduling, Mix model processing, Total Productive Maintenance and Control Charts. Lean principles can be applicable to any manufacturing sector like Apparel Industry, Machinery manufacturers, Computer chip makers and Helicopter manufacturers. Lean is also used in Logistics, Healthcare, and Software development areas.

II. BACKGROUND

In India, the textile field has always been considered as backbone of the country as equal to agriculture. It is a land of opportunities for textile and apparel industries. It is remarked that, this textile and apparel sectors are ancestral business, lacking to implement new technologies, pioneering skills, in the evolution of time. Implementing innovation and flexibility in production methods, combine together help us to sustain this flourished field now and in mere future. It also leads a diversion to old traditional methods.

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