Access Type

Open Access Dissertation

Date of Award

January 2019

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

First Advisor

Ratna B. Chinnam

Abstract

The seminal works of Peter Drucker and James Womack in the 1990’s outlined the lean manufacturing practices of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC) to become a world leader in manufacturing. These philosophies have since become the springboard for a significant paradigm shift in approaching manufacturing systems and how to leverage them to optimize operational practices and gain competitive advantage. While there is no shortage of literature touting the benefits of Lean Manufacturing Systems (LMS), there has been significant difficulty in effectively deploying them to obtain and sustain the performance that TMC has achieved.

This body of work provides a novel methodology to break the deployment process into different elements by assessing the current business practices/interests and relating them to variables that support the philosophies of LMS. It also associates the key areas of lean from an operational perspective and connects the tools to business requirements by guiding the selection process to more effectively choose tools/processes that best fit the business needs. Finally, this methodology looks at different aspects of the deployment variables to provide a structured approach to tailoring the deployment planning strategy based on better understanding of the different interactions/requirements of LMS.

The research also provides a validation of the proposed structured methodology to help practitioners leverage the resulting objective/quantitative information from assessing the current business to help coordinate deployment planning effort. The framework considers aspects prior to deployment planning by providing an approach for pre-deployment assessment to provide critical input for tailoring the LMS deployment.

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