Understanding Lean Manufacturing According to Axiomatic Design Principles

ABSTRACT The design and evaluation of manufacturing system design is the subject of this paper. Though muchattention has been given to the design of manufacturing systems, in practice most efforts still remainempirically-based. Numerous idioms have been used in the attempt to describe the operation ofmanufacturing systems. When a company tries to become "lean" or wants to increase the production andbecome more efficient, the company will start to introduce numerous concepts developed by Toyota andothers. The problem is that a company does not know the order in which to implement the lean changesor why they should implement what they are implementing. This approach greatly slows manufacturingimprovements when complementary or contradictive concepts are introduced on an ad-hoc basis. In thispaper, a sequence of implementation steps will be developed through the application of axiomatic design.This sequence will provide a design methodology for lean production which connects manufacturingsystem design objectives to operation design parameters. This paper will use the methodology developedto improve manufacturing processes in two different companies.