Author Description

The goal of lean manufacturing is to reduce the waste in human effort, inventory, time to market, and manufacturing space to become highly responsive to customer demand while producing world-class quality products in the most efficient and economical manner. Value stream mapping can be defined as a lean manufacturing technique used to analyze the flow of materials and information currently required to forward a product or service to a consumer. This study investigated and analyzed the root causes of all waste, developed current value stream maps for the cylinder manufacturing process and developed a future state map for cylinder manufacturing to identify improvements to be made to the value stream that would shorten the overall lead time and minimize waste through the application of various lean techniques.