Learning Lean Manufacturing in the Industry

Lean Manufacturing is on the rise nowadays. It refers to a systematic method for waste minimization within a manufacturing system while maintaining productivity in the process. "It's not a tool but beyond that perspective," stated Kemal Hadid Susena, Dipl. Ing, ST in his presentation entitled 'Lean Manufacturing in the Industry' at Sampoerna University, Friday (3/8/2019). He was sharing his experience as a top professional in the domestic manufacturing industry. Furthermore, he explained that lean manufacturing is a lifestyle or a culture which consists of five principles: customer needs, value chain mapping, flow creation, pull system, and continuous improvement. "In order to reduce waste and time, we need to know customer needs," said Kemal who currently works as Materials and Process Improvement Director of PT. Mattel Indonesia. “Speaking of value chain mapping, by knowing value chain we can map the process to fulfill our customer needs and identifying non-value activities,” he said. "We can also eliminate the non-value activities by value chain mapping and creating the flow process," Kemal added later. Pull System is the method to reduce inventory; while, Kaizen is a culture which uses many different tools and method to make continuous improvement in the process. Lean Manufacturing always requires evaluation from the process, identifies the non-value activities and applies the method that can reduce non-value activities. Kemal shared  that the success story of Mattel Indonesia was obtained by applying lean manufacturing which is by cutting down the non-valuable activities instead of improving the cycle time. The evaluation result revealed that Mattel can improve productivities by about 99%. (*/)