Lean production

To understand lean production it is important to distinguish between improving processes and improving operations ... 

Big pharma companies have to foster two opposite cultures at the same time, namely creative, intellectually intensive research a la Hollywood on one hand and capital-intensive lean production a la Detroit on the other hand. 

This sale and back-lease model is applied by many other pharmaceutical companies. It enables the company to dispose of assets without being forced to lay off employees. The net effect for the industry as a whole is that statistically, the share of outsourcing is increasing. However, the problem of underutilized capacity persists. For a hne-chemical company, the acquisition of an API plant from a pharma company is problematic. Once the supply contract, offered by the pharma company as an incentive for the acquisition, expires, the problem arises as to what the capacity should be used for. This is all the more the case as the plants usually are designed to manufacture just one product and therefore are not truly multipurpose. Last but not least, the plants have been run as cost centers and the implementation of a lean production... 

The double exposure on innovation and lean production of pharma s present business model. 

Just-in-Time, Lean Production, and Complementary Paradigms... 

JUST-IN-TIME, LEAN PRODUCTION, AND COMPLEMENTARY PARADIGMS... 

In the remainder of this chapter, we first provide a more detailed discussion of JIT/TPS in Section 2, including its philosophy and implementation issues. In Section 3, we examine the kanban system, widely used in JIT for control of production and inventory, and present a case study of JIT/kanban implementation. Section 4 follows with an examination of JIT s relation to complementary approaches such as total quality management (TQM) and total productive maintenance (TPM), together with a case study of their joint implementation. In Section 5, we examine lean production as an extension of JIT, explore the relationship of JIT to theory of constraints (TOC), and conclude with a brief consideration of applications to service industries of JIT, TOC, and other manufacturing-based approaches. 

JUST-IN-TIME, LEAN PRODUCTION, AND COMPLEMENTARY PARADIGMS 553 4.3. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)... 

The term lean production was introduced by Krafcik (1988) and the famous book. The Machine That Changed the World (Womack et al. 1990). These publications present the results of a major MIT study to identify systematically best practices of Japanese and other automobile manufacturers worldwide. Lean production is lean in that it uses half of the various production resources (labor, manufacturing space, tool investment, engineering hours, inventory, etc.) used in the Ford-style mass production that was prevalent into the 1980s. 

Through concurrent engineering and other approaches, lean product development has achieved astonishing results, requiring only one half or less of the time and human resources traditionally needed to develop a new car. Accordingly, it has become a cornerstone of time-based competition. Further means for improvement lie in the fuU exploitation of information technologies. In particular. 

Through these innovative practices, Toyota s lean production system formed a complete supply chain from source to user. Its system integrated suppliers and distributors with manufacturing and involved them in product development. In so doing, the lean production model has provided a prototype of the business paradigms of concurrent engineering and supply chain management. For an examination of the implementation of lean production in North American companies, see Liker (1998) and Liker et al. (1999). 

Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T., and Roos, D. (1990), The Machine that Changed the World The Story of Lean Production, Rawson Associates/Macmillan, New York. 

Customer-driven organizations, 1797 Customer-driven quality results, 1805 Customer knowledge, 1962 Customer management, 637 Customer orders, 329-331 Customer relationships, 1962-1963 as aspect of lean production, 557 Baldrige criteria for, 1963 globalization and changes in, 1888 Customer relationship management (CRM), 14, 34, 35... 

Alves, A. C., Dinis-Carvalho, J. and Sousa, R. (2012). Lean production as promoter of thinkers to achieve companies agility. The Learning Organization, 19(3), 219-237, ISSN 09696474, http //dx.doi.org/ 10.1108/09696471211219930... 

Carvalho, R., Alves, A. C. and Lopes, 1. (2011). Principles and practices of Lean Production applied in a metal structures production system. Lecture Notes in Engineering and Computer Science Proceedings of The World Congress on Engineering 2011, WCE 2011, 6-8 July, 2011, London, U.K., pp. 744-749. 

Costa, E., Braganfa, S., Alves, A. C. and Sousa, R. (2014). Action-research methodology to improve performance using lean production tools. Technics, Technologies, Education, Management (TTEM), 9(2), 253-264. 

Costa, E., Sousa, R., Bragan a, S. and Alves, A. C. (2013). An industrial application of the SMED methodology and other Lean production tools. Proceedings of Integrity, Reliability and Failure (1RF2013), INEGI Editions, Funchal/Portugal, 23-27 June 2013. http //hdl.handle. net/1822/25314... 

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