Framework for a lean manufacturing planning system

This paper presents a planning system for Lean Manufacturing and is applicable to a variety of manual and automated manufacturing operations. By defining a standard set of Lean Manufacturing metrics, our research sets up a framework for performance measurement and benchmarking. A financial Cost of Waste measure is developed from data on current performance levels, and the planning framework develops a Lean Scorecard that establishes the gap of current performance from desired stretch performance targets, to facilitate planning for closure of the performance gap. For planning, users select one or more of 14 standard Lean Manufacturing strategies ranging from Kanban or Pull systems, to manufacturing cells. Each strategy can be implemented at a basic or comprehensive level. In addition, projected performance improvements are used to estimate the performance improvements for each of the metrics. Finally, a Lean Manufacturing Cash Flow summary is developed to show Cost of Waste, Cost of Lean Implementation, and Lean Savings over a five-year period. Together, these cash flows make it possible to compute a Return on Investment (ROI) evaluation of the Lean Manufacturing expenditures.