A study on implementation of lean manufacturing in Indian foundry industry by analysing lean waste issues

Lean proliferates the value-adding work by eliminating wastes and reducing incidental and non-value-adding work to a certain possible extent. Waste can be defined as anything other than the essential resources of people, machines, and materials that are needed to add value to the product. According to the lean concept, any action which does not directly enhance product’s value can be considered as waste. Analysis of lean waste issues is one of the primary steps to implement lean principles in many industries and the same is applicable for the foundry industry as well. The purpose of this article is to investigate the importance of various lean waste issues in Indian foundry industry for improvement in productivity and elimination of wastes, thereby initiating lean implementation. For the purposes of this study, we employed the survey questionnaire method to collect data against 17 lean waste issues from 71 middle- to senior-level professionals belonging to Indian foundry industry. The survey instrument of lean waste issues is developed based on a number of sources from the literature and formal discussions with academicians and foundry industry professionals. The responses were received on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from never found to mostly found. Descriptive statistics is employed to find out the relative significance of lean waste issues. Exploratory factor and reliability analyses are conducted to obtain and validate constructs and measure each construct’s Cronbach’s alpha. Finally, the study concludes that there is a need for elimination of lean waste issues to implement lean manufacturing and fulfil the requirements of Indian foundry industry.

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