Investigations on spotting and eliminating non value adding activities in engineering organizations through lean manufacturing strategies

Abstract

During the past three decades, engineering organizations have been implementing lean manufacturing paradigm to acquire competitive strength. Yet, researchers have been reporting the failure of the efforts made to implement lean manufacturing paradigm in those engineering organizations. Hence, a need has arisen to provide these engineering organizations with a model for enabling to successfully implement lean manufacturing paradigm. In order to meet this requirement, these engineering organizations are required to spot Non-Value Adding Activities (NVAAs) and eliminate them. In this background, the doctoral work reported in this thesis was carried out. newlineThe doctoral work reported in this thesis was begun by over viewing the literature arena to study the state of the art researches on lean manufacturing. This overview indicates that as many as 388 papers on lean manufacturing have appeared so far in literature arena. Most of these papers have reported that the implementation of lean manufacturing has facilitated organizations to improve their performance. Most of the authors of these papers view lean manufacturing as a paradigm required for enabling organizations to acquire competitive strength. However, very few papers have reported the failure of lean manufacturing in enabling organizations to achieve performance improvement. A projection in this direction indicated the need for identifying, spotting and eliminating NVAAs. newline newline