Lean supplychain management in garment industry

Abstract

Quality of products, services and processes has become a crucial factor in the performance of an organization in todayand#8223;s global market. As a result there is a worldwide trend to ensure consistent and standardized processes that produce products and services meeting and surpassing customerand#8223;s needs. The present study has a look at the main theme to identify exceptional tools and strategies from lean manufacturing standards that are relevant particularly to the garment industries. A literature survey revealed that there are gaps prevailing in application of some of the lean manufacturing tools and techniques in garment manufacturing industries. It has been observed from the survey that implementation of lean manufacturing tools in any industry is user specific, and these tools play an effective role in reducing wastes and improving the lean compliancy. Hence, in this research work, an attempt has been made to implement some of the lean manufacturing tools and techniques in garment industry and proposes a conceptual frame work for garment industry to achieve high level of performance. Existing system in garment industries has been evaluated from lean manufacturing perspective and based on the shortcomings it has been decided to carry out the research study on implementation of Value Stream Mapping, 5S housekeeping, KANBAN systems, Line balancing and standardization of work. After evaluating the current state of garment industry, a future state has been proposed and implemented in various section of garment industry and the outcomes shows huge improvement in productivity. New design is implemented for specific fabric withdrawal and production ordering for some of the processes based on the KANBAN system. 5S implementation yielded positive results in the stores department. A significant improvement has been made in sewing section by balancing the production line using ranked positional weighted method. Standardize work is achieved by implementing various operating procedures and practices to employees. Several performance measures such as reducing non-value added activities, defects; lead-time and inventory are considered and the results has indicated that new and young organizations should implement lean support tools earlier in their life cycle as in a sequence of VSM, 5S, KANBAN, Line balancing and Standardize work in phased manner newline