END445E Lean Production Systems

2019-2020 Fall Semester

Term Project Assignment
Assistant: Mehmet Kürşat Öksüz

Stage-1: Current State

1. Please visit a production system and based on your observations, find the problems of
industrial housekeeping. What kind of improvements can be made on the
manufacturing environment? Please present five solutions, and explain them, briefly.
You should use visual material to explain them better.
2. Analyze the production system that you have observed in terms of production flow and
production control, in detail.
3. Analyze the setup times of the machines. Are they less than 10 minutes or longer?
Determine the machine with the longest setup time.
4. Select a product family and draw the current state value-stream map (VSM) for this
product family. (All products produced by the same machines/facilities should be
included in the product family!!).
5. Determine the problems of the production system based on the current state VSM.
What are the reasons of them? Please indicate at least four issues that need
improvement (problems) and explain their reasons.
6. Are there any machines that frequently fail?
7. Are there any quality problems regarding the raw materials, parts or products?
8. Determine the problems of the system for production control (flow of products) that
cannot be shown within the VSM of the system.

Stage-2: Future State

1. Is the production system capable of satisfying the demand of the customer on time?
2. What kind of lean solution techniques or tools can be implemented to solve the
problems indicated at the first stage of your project?
3. Will you use Kanban or CONWIP? If you will use Kanban, determine the supermarket
volumes, and calculate the number of Kanbans. In addition, please show the necessary
design calculations for each of the solution technique that you propose.
4. What techniques or solutions do you suggest to improve the logistics/distribution
activities both within the manufacturing system and between the manufacturing
company & suppliers? Will you use direct shipping or milk-run between the suppliers
and your company? Why? Explain your reasons.
5. Draw the future state VSM of the production system that you have designed, based on
the solutions proposed at the previous stage. Show your logistics solutions as well.
6. Propose some solutions to decrease the setup time of the machine having the longest
setup time according to the SMED methodology.
7. To solve the quality or machine failure problems, propose some solutions.
8. What kind of Industry 4.0 or automation technologies can be implemented and to
which stages can you apply them to improve performance?
9. What is the expected improvement do you estimate after implementation of these
solutions?
10. What is the cost of implementing the solutions that you propose? Do they require
additional resources? What are these resources?