A study on decisive tool "value stream mapping "to excel the potentiality of manufacturing industries

During the second half of the twentieth century, several business sectors have experienced far-reaching changes, due to global investment, innovation in technology and deregulation imposed on the businesses. All these factors compounding together – has caused severe impact on the businesses of this 21st century, which has forced most of the leaders in several sectors to implement more competitive manufacturing system. The best answer as seen in many manufacturing engineering arena is Value Stream Mapping (VSM) - a Lean technique. It is a fundamental tool which identifies waste, reduce process cycle times, and implement process improvement. This study is concerned with four product families at a manufacturing engineering firm which are produced in many configurations and once the order is placed for a particular product it takes nearly 60 days to pass through the production process. This long lead time and backlogs of order has driven this firm to quote a 70 days lead time to customers. In the process of working on this paper through VSM, we have ascertained that the productivity improvement can be increased by curbing out non-value added activities. Also this paper has revealed that production lead time could be reduced drastically.