Development of a multi-objective methodology to select lean initiatives and weighted leanness measurement methodology in modular manufacturing companies

Development of a multi-objective methodology to select lean initiatives and weighted leanness measurement methodology in modular manufacturing companies

The survival of manufacturing organisations in today’s competitive market depends on the quality of products and services, effectiveness of manufacturing operations, cost and waste reduction, and profit and market share growth. In this respect, one of the most established and well-known tools are lean manufacturing practices. The decision of selecting the most appropriate lean initiatives to adopt and apply in the production process while preserving cost and time benefits is a challenging task for most companies. Therefore, a multi-objective methodology that considers the impacts of each lean strategy on identified critical performance metrics and manufacturing wastes is proposed through this research. The results from the developed methodology in this research suggest the best set of lean initiatives for improving the most critical performance metrics and reduce non-value activities (wastes). The proposed methodology also provides more accurate results in suggesting a set of lean tools compared to the previous methods as it considers more than one factor.

Moreover, this research further extends the most recent leanness assessment model by developing a methodology that considers the interdependent relationships between lean performance metrics to provide an overall leanness index. Several research studies developed leanness assessment models, however, in these studies different performance metrics were considered to be equally important. In contrast, this research developed a weighted leanness measurement methodology. This was achieved through assigning relative importance weights to each performance metric based on competitive strategies when measuring the integrated leanness score.

A local modular construction company was used for this research to validate and show the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed methodologies. Furthermore, one of the suggested lean initiatives from the proposed methodology was adopted and implemented and the leanness score of the company was measured before and after the lean application using the weighted leanness measurement.

Through this research, the developed methodology for selecting lean initiatives and the weighted leanness measurement approach are used to advance the current knowledge of lean manufacturing by providing more accurate results from both methodologies.