Applying lean in aerospace manufacturing

Abstract Lean manufacturing provides a new management approach for many small and medium size manufactures, especially old firms organised and managed by under traditional push systems. Improvement results can be dramatic in terms of quality, cycle times, and customer responsiveness which is more than a set of tools and techniques and has been widely adopted by many production companies. In Lean manufacturing all employees continuously look for ways to improve processes. Simply lean, is a systematic method for eliminating waste within a production process. It also takes considers waste created through overburden and also through unevenness in workloads. The main concept is to increase customer value with minimum waste. Lean is simply adding more value for customers with fewer resources. The advantage of this concept is, it reduces non-value-added resources, including space, material, tooling, and labour. It applies such principles as waste minimization, flexibility, and responsiveness to change; these are supported by efforts to optimize the flow of material and information and to achieve superior quality in order to eliminate scrap and rework. Though lean manufacturing was originally developed for the automotive industry, aerospace manufacturing companies have found that these principles can also be applied in this high-precision industry to create dramatic improvements in the efficiency of production. Our aim is to identify the bottlenecks in the production line of a reputed manufacturing industry. The main objective is to provide a background on lean manufacturing, present on overview of manufacturing wastes and introduce the tools and techniques that are used to transform a company into a high performing lean enterprise.