Investigation of manufacturing performance improvement through lean tools in garment industry

Abstract

The current mass production system in sewing section called Progressive Bundling System This typical system is mostly followed in India which creates high level of non value added activity causes low productivity longer production lead time high rework and rejection poor line balancing low flexibility of style changeover etc These major problems are occurred in the sewing section of the apparel firm Most of the time failure to meet delivery time is because of the sewing section Sewing operations needs high skill, because of difficulty associated with repairing of products sewed with wrong specifications Thus we have to give more attention to sewing than to cutting and other value chains of garment production Since various research references concluded that these kinds of problems were addressed by implementing customized lean tools like value stream mapping cellular manufacturing single piece flow Kaizen 5S Total Productive Maintenance etc The goal of this research is to understand the lean manufacturing principles and its suitability towards the garment industry application then implementing those identified lean tools in sewing section and evaluates their benefits out of it