J.C. Chen et al 1070 he past few years have seen the dollar become weaker and weaker, increasing the competitive advantage of manufacturing firms in the USA. Companies in Europe, where the Pound and Euro are very strong, have begun to purchase goods from American uppliers while also relocating sales jobs to America, where manufacturing costs are comparatively overseas, European firms are expanding their American facilities and searching for new facilities across the USA (Macdonald 2007) cheaper. At the same time that American companies are outsourcing jobs ufacturing was first implemented by Toyota Corporation in response to the ta Production System) mass-production model. When engineers at Toyota researched mass-production systems they discovered that their mass-production model, which eliminated changeover time b using one machine for each part, was not optimally efficient (Toyo They discovered that machines downstream were sitting idle until the specific part the machine made was required for production. These idle machines contributed to waste in the process. Therefore, the engineers from Toyota created a lean manufacturing system. This As a result, the Toyota Production System (TPS) used fewer resources than mass production. Organisations have found that, by identifying and removing waste, as well a implementing key lean tools, they can continuously improve their productivity, increase quality, and become more cost effective (Imai 1997) ystem focused on the continuous identification and elimination of waste The rest of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 provides information about kaizen and the lean tools used in the case study. Section 3 provides information about the company as well as why they wanted to implement lean manufacturing in their facility Section 4 provides information about the current manufacturing system and how we collected this information. Section 5 presents the future state of the facility. Section 6 describes the kaizen events performed in the case study. Finally, Section 7 provides the conclusions from this research 2. Kaizen and lean tools According to Monden (1998), any task in a manufacturing facility can be classified into one of three categories: incidental work, value-added work, and muda. Incidental processes are processes such as inspection that do not add value to the product, but are required in the current production system. Value-added processes add value to the product, such as the final assembly of a product. Finally, non-value added processes, or muda, are defined as any process that does not add value to the product and is not required by the current production system. Mudas can be classified into seven categories which are also known as the seven deadly wastes. These seven deadly wastes include overproduction, waiting, transportation, over processing, inventory, motion and defects (Womack and Jones 1996). Another way to look at muda is to say that it is any activity that the customer is not willing to pay for In order to increase the amount of value-added work in a facility, some companies will simply choose to increase the working hours as shown in Figure 1(b). However, rather than simply achieving the goal of increasing value-added work, the company has also increased incidental work and muda. In such a case, the company's competitive position is Therefore, a better way to increase the amount of value-added work in the facility is to cut down the amount of incidental work and muda. Kaizen was designed for not enhanced. International Journal of Production Research 1071 Value Added Muda Work Value Added Muda Work Incidental Incidental Work Work Muda Value Added Inc. Work Work Kaizen Figure I. (a) Composition of workers time. (b) Affect of hours increase on composition. (c) Affect of kaizen on composition. this very purpose: to continually improve the process by identifying and reducing waste. By using kaizen, companies are able to reshape the composition of work, in order to decrease muda and incidental work. The shaded slice in Figure 1(c) is used to illustrate the transformation from incidental work and muda to value added work. Since the goal of kaizen is to continuously identify and decrease the amount of muda in a system, it is important to identify and separate muda from incidental and value-added work. After identifying muda, the next step is to determine how to reduce it. One common way to reduce muda is through kaizen. The goal of kaizen is to involve every employee in thinking up small improvement ideas on a regular basis. When small improvements are implemented they can make work easier and more enjoyable. It is important to realise that a series of small, strategic improvements can quickly add up to a significant increases in system efficiency (Bodek 2002). When setting out to do a kaizen activity there are several lean tools available, ranging from value-stream mapping to asking the '5 whys'. Since every case is different, determining which tools to utilise becomes the job of the lean practitioner. Some of the most commonly utilised lean tools are given below, along with a brief description of each tool. 2.1 Process at a glance After a particular product has been identified for improvement, the next step is to determine what is involved in the manufacturing of that particular product. The process at a glance shows which processes are involved and the sequential order of operations. This information typically includes a description of the operation, cycle time, percentage 1073 International Journal of Production Research that can be performed: full factorial design and fractional design. A full factorial design is the more desirable of the two options, because it performs a more thorough analysis, but it also requires more trials, and thus, more resources. Fractional DOE experiments allow companies to perform DOE, but this more limited method does not uncover all the information that would have been gained with the use of a full factorial design 3. Company information Company A is a small electrical manufacturing business in the Midwestern United States. The major products of Company A are indus Company A has a wide variety of customers located all over the world, ranging from general contractors, to industrial facilities, to large commercial power gri Company A's products are made to their customers' exact specifications; therefore, it i uncommon for the company to make two identical products. Although the manager had knowledge about how lean manufacturing could help the company, the workers at Company A had yet to complete a lean manufacturing project, and expressed their desire to transform the facility using Lean/Sigma strategy in order to increase the efficiency of their plant. Although Lean/Sigma has potential applications enterprise-wide in Company A, the witchboard unit was chosen as the starting point of this lean transformation project, since it is the major manufacturing section of the facility and involves the highest amount of personnel and equipment. Therefore, a Lean/Sigma team was formed consisting of researchers in collaboration with operators, engineers, and a manager from Company A trial switchgears and switchboards ds. All of 4. Current status 4.1 Process overvie The first step in creating a value-stream map is to collect data that represents the current status in the facility. The Lean/Sigma team visited Company A's production facility and performed two walkthroughs with the manufacturing manager, tracing the paths that the material and information flow through the production facility of Company A. For the first walkthrough, the Lean/Sigma team walked with the manufacturing manager from the raw material receiving dock downstream to the finished products shipping dock. This made the Lean/Sigma team familiar with the current flow and the sequence of processes in the facility. Next, the Lean/Sigma team walked from the shipping dock upstream towards the raw material dock. This gives the Lean/Sigma team a better sense of the customer pace that the facility should operate on Walking through the facility allowed the Lean/Sigma team to collect the detailed process information that represents the current status of manufacturing system. Figure 2 shows the detailed process time and rough uptime for each process in a sequential order from the first process to the last one when it is ready to be shipped. Based on this information, the current value-stream map of Company A's facility is generated, as shown in Figure 3 The standard operation routing sheet (Figure 4) gives a more detailed breakdown of the operations involved in the fabrication stage of manufacturing as well as showing what the worker was doing at a particular time in the fabrication stage. The fabrication includes four processes: shearing, plasma cutting, de-burring, and braking The representative product the Lean/Sigma team studied requires six metal sheets stage