Identification of Major Lean Production Waste in Automobile Industries using Weighted Average Method

Industrial muda elimination is a major challenge that is faced by the experts in the day to day activities of production systems. Mostly there are seven types of industrial muda in lean systems such as Defects, Overproduction of things not demanded by actual customers, Inventories awaiting further processing or consumption, Unnecessary over-processing, Unnecessary motion of employees, Unnecessary transport and handling of goods, Waiting for an upstream process to deliver, or for a machine to finish processing, or for a supporting function to be completed. Every organization faces particular type of waste that occurs in day to day production activities. In order to find out the most influential lean waste based on the ranking, a survey has been conducted in 91 automobile industries based on the 5 point likerts scale to find the highly impacted lean muda. The survey results stating that 3 types of waste arising out of 7 waste which heavily affect the production system. Hence this work mainly deals with assessing the most deadly waste by ranking the major waste using the weighted average method in which each waste is assigned a weight. Based on the results, the major muda, which are identified that affects the production activities are discussed in detail and how this muda can be eliminated and incorporated with the production system are discussed (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.