Assessment of the Implementation of Lean Manufacturing Concepts in the Palestinian Dairy Industry
Date
2017-05
Authors
Judeh, Asem
Ali, Bara’a
Tbailah, Majd
Hindi, Moataz
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Abstract
The Palestinian dairy sub-sector has two distinct markets. The first includes herders throughout the West Bank producing raw milk for traditional processors with extremely small-scale family enterprises. The second is an industrial dairy sub-sector producing dairy products for the supermarket clientele.
Due to the Increasing spread of the Lean manufacturing system, the need has arisen to develop means to investigate the level of understanding of this system in companies. the lack of a clear understanding of lean performance and its measurements, and the implementation of traditional management are significant reasons that lean practices have failed. to increase competition and customer expectations require companies to apply lean manufacturing system not traditional management to gain powerful competitive advantages in the globalized marketplace.
This project aim to assess the implementation of lean manufacturing concepts in dairy industry in the west bank , in order to assess the implementation it is first necessary to define questionnaire to explore the extent of lean manufacturing implementation in dairy industry , this survey was performed on nine dairy producing firms in the west bank .The respondents were chosen from those who may directly involved with lean manufacturing practices ,and believe of its importance in achieving organizations continuous improvement .
The expected results from this survey is to define the barriers that prevent or delay the lean implementation in dairy industry, because of the lack of understanding of lean concepts and shop floor employees attitude, also to analyze the gap, and develop a frame work that helps dairy industry to implement lean manufacturing concepts tools to achieve its goals.
As a result, there is a weakness in implementing lean manufacturing practices. Particularly there is a weakness in implementing the most important tool “VSM”, and clear implementation of “5S” tool, where the strongest factory which implement lean manufacturing concepts tools is Aljunidi and the weakest is Al-Safi.