Lean Manufacturing on Make-to-order Suppliers: a Case Study

The lean manufacturing system has helped many companies to improve operational performance, mainly in the automotive and electronic supply chains. Although lean manufacturing revealed to be effective for repetitive systems, some small and medium suppliers, faced with high mix and low volume production, have had difficulty to implement the lean manufacturing. The main objective of this paper is to analyze lean manufacturing applicability to MTO companies. The results achieved from the case study conducted reveal that lean manufacturing principles, combined with a proper pull mechanism, can be appropriate to MTO, promoting better due date performance and cycle time reduction.