Lean manufacturing process establishment for lead time reduction in pump manufacturing industry used for health care applications

Today's competitive world pump manufacturing companies for health care applications are wants to fulfill their customer needs to retain their position in the market. The main objective of this research is to reduce the lead time by finding bottleneck station and non-value-added activities in a pump manufacturing industry which manufactures different kinds of pumps used in health care applications. This research work deals with some important lean tools and techniques for identifying the bottleneck. The bottleneck stations were identified with the help of current state value stream mapping and after assembly line was balanced using flexible line balancing software. Further improvements were made with the lean techniques cause and effect diagram, Pareto chart, and layout optimization with future state value stream mapping. From the results it was observed that, the total lead time is reduced about 13% and the efficiency of the assembly line is improved up to 97.4% through line balancing.