Today many industries have accepted both lean manufacturing and industry 4.0 to maintain the quality of their products and services consistent on-demand. Lean Producers adopts the philosophy of doing more with less by eliminating non-value-added activities from production processes to maintain effectiveness, flexibility, and profitability. With the context of Industry 4.0, new solutions are available for combining automation technology with Lean Production.
A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.
To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.
The term Industry 4.0 defined as “A combination of communication and networking (Industrial Internet), embedded systems (Cyber-Physical Systems), adaptive robotics, cybersecurity, data analytics, and artificial intelligence, and additive manufacturing make the smart factory. With the support of smart machines that get access to more data, factories become more efficient, productive, and less wasteful.
Industry 4.0 optimizes the computerization of Industry 3.0 where machines are digitally connected with one another and create and share information and communicate with one another to ultimately make decisions without human involvement. Moreover, when effective resource (finance, labour, material, machine/equipment) usage is concerned, it is obvious that Industry 4.0 should be applied to lean processes.
What is Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production?
Lean manufacturing, or lean production, is a production method derived from Toyota’s 1930 operating model Toyota Production System, TPS. Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production can describe as a multi-faceted production approach comprising a variety of industrial practices, directed towards identifying value-adding processes and to enable the flow of these processes through the organization.
Lean is a toolbox that assists in the identification and elimination of waste. The core idea is eliminating waste, quality improves while production time and cost are reduced while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.
It is also very important to understand the term”waste” here. Generally, Waste is any unwanted or unusable substance or material that is left after manufacturing products. It is worthless, defective, and useless.
But in Lean, Waste is something more as complex. There are eight forms of waste that have existed within the real “physical” world of lean as following:
- Overproduction
- Defects
- Waiting
- Transportation
- Inventory
- Motion
- Overprocessing
- Unutilized skills
These eight forms of wastes must be identified and eliminated through Lean Manufacturing systems and industry 4.0 tools.
Combination of Lean Manufacturing and Industry 4.0
Lean Production System and Industry 4.0 both are revolutionary production management system which could make a profit by decreasing costs through a production system that completely eliminated excessive inventory and workforce. From a technological point of view, the Lean Manufacturing system can be regarded as a complement to industry 4.0.
Industry 4.0 is a bundle of the most complex technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3-D Printing or Additive Manufacturing, Cloud Technologies, Virtual or Augmented reality, and Adaptive Robotics and on the other hand, Lean Manufacturing has many techniques such as 5S, Jidoka, Kaizen, Poka-yoke, Kanban, Root Cause Analysis, Muda, Mura, Muri, Jit, Fmea, etc to enhance productivity.
Thus, The combination of Industry 4.0 technologies and Lean Manufacturing called “Digital Lean Manufacturing” (DLM).
Digital Lean Manufacturing introduced new capabilities of information and operational technologies, such as powerful virtual models and simulations as well as real-time performance monitoring systems based on advanced data analytics that have the ability to proactively detect and eliminate ‘traditional’ physical waste (above mentioned) and digital waste within the production processes.
What is Digital Waste?
Digital Waste: digital waste is defined as any non-value-adding digital activity to manpower, materials, machines, methods, and measurements (5 M) in the Digital Lean smart Factory. This also includes the creation of redundant and/or unnecessary data that is collected, managed, transmitted, or stored for no tactical, operational, or strategic reasons. These digital wastes create unwanted and wasteful data congestion in a decision-making process.
There are two types of Digital Waste as follows:
- Passive digital Waste: due to missing digital opportunities to unlock the power of existing data.
- Active digital Waste: the result of a data-rich manufacturing environment that lacks the proper information management approaches to derive the right amount of information to be provided at the right time to the right person, machine, or information system for decision-making.
Introduction of Digital Lean Manufacturing
Digital technologies have given rise to a new era of lean manufacturing, which extends the lean philosophy to the cyber world. Digital Lean Manufacturing builds on new data acquisition, data integration, data processing, and data visualization capabilities to create different descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics applications to identify, predict, and resolve issues.
Digital Lean Manufacturing also prevents the unstable process parameters or avoids quality issues inside tolerance ranges that may lead to any type of cyber & physical waste. Thus the goal of the Digital Lean cyber-physical production system is to make nearly zero physical and digital waste into the lean digital smart factories.
This zero digital and physical waste achieved by a synchronized production environment between virtual models and simulations that will help to design, engineer, verify and validate waste-free production operations in the smart factories.
Digital Lean Manufacturing also helps to monitor real-time performance in the physical world in order to assess whether production operations are actually being performed at their highest possible productivity level and quality standard, as planned, or if any opportunities for improvement.
Conclusion
In recent days, Industry 4.0 and Lean Manufacturing technologies have made great progress and many industries are using Digital Lean manufacturing for achieving the highest level of productivity. Since researchers are still making it better day by day, it will have a profound impact in the field of manufacturing in the future.
