Abstract:

Lean manufacturing is a production strategy that has been used since 1950's. The main concern of this strategy is to determine resource of waste and try to eliminate waste. Companies do not only eliminate waste but also they try to keep their competitiveness as high as their competitors. Lean manufacturing has some tools such as Value Stream Mapping, Kanban, Kaizen, 5s, CONWIP etc. to imply over the production system to enhance its effectiveness. The goal of this paper is to apply Value Stream Mapping to improve production line of a textile company as a case study.  Value stream mapping (VSM) is one of the most used lean manufacturing technique for illustrating and analyzing the logic of a production process and it provides companies to see all production line on the paper. The main idea of VSM is to see the whole system as a picture not only part by part. In this paper, VSM was used to demonstrate the present production line and imply lean techniques on this map. Our selected company is a textile producer which exports their products from Istanbul to Europe. We apply 5s principles to reduce lead time and increase productivity. VSM final result shows that Production Lead Time (PLT) decreased 14.5 days to 5.2 days by applying lean techniques.

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