Abstract:
A "waste" is anything that the customer is not willing to pay for. Lean manufacturing is a technique employed to increase the value of a product by eliminating wastes and lead-time. Now a day’s most of the waste generating in the steel production process is in the form of rework which lean considers it as its wastes. In ABMI, it observed that large amounts of wastes are recorded (0.42%, 2.5% and 7.7%) on the different areas of the steel processing line starting from the scrap up to the product or the reinforcement bar. These encountered wastes can eliminated or reduced to enhance the overall production efficiency of the company. Hence, the main focus of this thesis is on waste assessment and reduction using the concepts of lean production.
Therefore, due to the status and waste related problems faced with the selected case company, the researcher has followed a mixed qualitative-quantitative approaches. Using variety of approached towards waste minimization, in this thesis the author has first following waste identification assessment to see the critical wastes in the case company before lean scoring techniques. After the critical wastes identified in each sub process the authors has gone through waste management evaluation based on the 4R model discussed in the literature review. This procedures has mostly dependent on the secondary data and experts judgment on the situation.
The experts’ evaluation showed, in the selected case company lack of strategy and action plan in managing waste has considered as the main source of wastes related to material type categories. As experts evaluation proofed in the case company all those list of wastes has occurred due to loose attention given to the workshop workers by the top management especially on the evening shift and launch hours. The experts’ evaluation reveals that limited quality by supervisor caused workers not to give due attention their work and made them to produce defected products. Moreover, machines situation and obsolescence has cased in creating all types of wastes in the waste category. Furthermore, in the situational investigation of lean score it has investigated that lean practices has remained stagnant and not even started in the case company. So this research has developed framework model based on the waste minimization strategy and supervision on standardization