Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: What is lean manufacturing?
Manufacturing companies, including medical device and pharmaceutical manufacturers, operate in highly regulated environments which often necessitate a great deal of resources, time, and money being expended in the testing, release, and quality assurance of their products. Since the early 1990s, there has been a more widespread drive to adopt more lean approaches both in the manufacturing and testing of products. The advances in lean thinking developed and refined in the automotive industry initially by Toyota (TPS) are now being used as best practices across most manufacturing sectors. The idea of lean laboratory shares its origins with lean manufacturing and uses the same tools to deliver the most efficient and least wasteful processes, tools such as Kaizen, Just In Time (JIT), Heijunka, Kanban, and Six Sigma.
The loo is reportedly the "brainchild" of Randy Leonard, who copyrighted the stainless steel design in 2008.
To the extent that cultural contributions comprise invention, innovation, and progress, Springfield has been, historically, one of the nation's most innovative cities. In 1819, inventor Thomas Blanchard invented the lathe in Springfield, which would catalyze manufacturing developments now known the world over as interchangeable parts and the assembly line. In 1825, Blanchard also built the first American car, a "horseless carriage," which was powered by steam. In 1844, inventor Charles Goodyear perfected and patented his process for making vulcanized rubber in Springfield - as of 2011, as it has been for many years previous, Goodyear's name is known the world over for rubber production. In 1868, inventor Margaret E. Knight invented a machine for folding and gluing flat-bottomed paper bags.
While its initial operations were merely the assembling of parts imported from foreign companies, South Korea is today among the most advanced automobile-producing countries in the world. Annual domestic output first exceeded one million units in 1988. In the 1990s, the industry manufactured numerous in-house models, demonstrating not only its capabilities in terms of design, performance, and technology, but also signalling its coming of age.
In 1966, Yoneyama Industory, an agricultural machinery maker in Matsuyama, Ehime Prefecture, invented , a freight-only rack monorail system. It soon became widespread in mikan citrus orchards in the prefecture, and in other parts of Japan. Other makers also started to build similar systems. Later in 1990, a company called Chigusa developed a passenger rack monorail system. These rack monorails were first used to transport workers in construction sites or forests. However, from 1990s, public facilities such as parks also started to use the system. Kaho Manufacturing started to sell their "slope cars" in 1990.
The Lincoln Motor Company Plant, built in Detroit, Michigan, by Henry Leland in 1917, was closed after 1952; subsequent Lincolns were produced alongside Mercury Montereys and Mercury Montclairs. For the 1957 model year, Ford opened Wixom Assembly in Wixom, Michigan, as a facility to specialize in Lincoln production. From 1957 to 2007, the facility produced Lincoln vehicles nearly exclusively, along with the Ford GT and several generations of the Ford Thunderbird.
For the 1956 model year, Ford Motor Company created the Continental Division, slotted above Lincoln as the flagship marque of Ford Motor Company. At its launch, Continental introduced the Continental Mark II as its model line, intended as a successor to the 1940-1948 Lincoln Continental personal luxury car. Offered as a two-door hardtop coupe, the Mark II broke from a number of American styling precedents of the time. While fitted with whitewall tires, the exterior was fitted with minimal chrome trim on the body sides; tailfins were left off of the body completely. In place of the bumper-mounted spare tire of the original Lincoln Continental, the trunklid of the Mark II showcased the design element, with a large imitation spare tire bulge (which fit over the actual spare tire inside the trunk). The Mark II was largely hand-built, with extensive quality testing done to each engine and transmission before leaving the factory.
The machine industry or machinery industry is a subsector of the industry, that produces and maintains machines for consumers, the industry, and most other companies in the economy.
On the other end the machinery industry supplies consumer goods, including kitchen appliances, refrigerators, washers, dryers and a like. Production of radio and television, however, is generally considered belonging to the electrical equipment industry. The machinery industry itself is a major customer of the steel industry.
As Lincoln entered the 21st century, the brand underwent a major transition within the structure of Ford Motor Company. As Ford expanded its global automotive holdings during the 1980s and 1990s, it acquired Jaguar, Aston Martin, Land Rover, and Volvo Cars. To collectively manage its global luxury-vehicle holdings, in 1999, Ford organized Premier Automotive Group (PAG). The same year, the management of Lincoln-Mercury was shifted to the American headquarters of PAG, largely in an effort to engineer and market more competitive vehicles for the brand.
Japan has a large industrial capacity, and is home to some of the largest and most technologically advanced producers of motor vehicles, electronics, machine tools, steel and nonferrous metals, ships, chemical substances, textiles, and processed foods. Agricultural businesses in Japan cultivate 13 percent of Japan's land, and Japan accounts for nearly 15 percent of the global fish catch, second only to China. , Japan's labor force consisted of some 65.9 million workers. Japan has a low unemployment rate of around four percent. Some 20 million people, around 17 per cent of the population, were below the poverty line in 2007. Housing in Japan is characterized by limited land supply in urban areas.
Unit production peaked in 2010 at about 650 million units and has been in a slow decline since then. Shipments in 2017 estimated at about 404 million units.Manufacturing began in California's Silicon Valley in 1957 with IBM's production shipment of the first HDD, the IBM RAMAC 350. The industry grew slowly at first with three additional companies in the market by 1964, Anelex Corp., Bryant Computer Products and Data Products Corp.. The industry grew rapidly in the late 1960s and again in the 1980s reaching a peak of 75 manufacturers in 1984. There have been at least 221 companies manufacturing hard disk drives but most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. Surviving manufacturers are Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital (WD) with Toshiba as the senior participant having entered the market in 1977, twenty years after IBM started the market.
Textile manufacturing is one of the oldest human activities. The oldest known textiles date back to about 5000 B.C. In order to make textiles, the first requirement is a source of fibre from which a yarn can be made, primarily by spinning. The yarn is processed by knitting or weaving to create cloth. The machine used for weaving is the loom. Cloth is finished by what are described as wet processes to become fabric. The fabric may be dyed, printed or decorated by embroidering with coloured yarns.
The legendary Ford Mustang, the first of the "pony" cars, was developed and introduced in 1964 under the guidance of Lee Iacocca (Lehigh Class of 1946), former general manager of Ford Motor Company's Ford Division. Still in production, the Mustang combined fun, performance and styling at a low price and had the most successful first year sales of any automobile. In its first two years of production, three Ford Motor Company plants produced nearly 1.5 million Mustangs, a record unequaled before or since.
Kahn had at least 75 patented inventions related to reinforced concrete. Kahn's first patented invention was the "Kahn Trussed Bar", also called "The Kahn Bar" or "Kahn Bar System", patented in 1903. This was the main product of the Trussed Concrete Steel Company, although the company produced many prefabricated steel products as well as complete buildings. Kahn's co-workers noted that he would stop what he was doing and write down an idea immediately, no matter what he was engaged in. Truscon employees were encouraged to come up with improvement ideas that would benefit the company and would be rewarded financially if their ideas were used. For example, David H. Morgan, a company employee, invented a new type of airplane hangar door that was subsequently manufactured by Truscon and was financially rewarded for his idea.
Production (and consumption) of agricultural plant commodities has a diverse geographical distribution. Along with climate and corresponding types of vegetation, the economy of a nation also influences the level of agricultural production. Production of some products is highly concentrated in a few countries while other are widely produced. For instance, China, the leading producer of wheat and ramie in 2013, produces 6% of the world's ramie fiber but only 17% of the world's wheat. Products with more evenly distributed production see more frequent changes in ranking of the top producers.
The Lincoln Motor Company was founded in August 1917 by Henry Leland and his son Wilfred. Among the founders of Cadillac, Leland had sold the company to General Motors in 1909, remaining on as an executive until 1917, when he left over a dispute with GM President William Durant. Naming Lincoln Motor Company after Abraham Lincoln, the first President for whom he ever voted (1864), Leland financed the company by securing a $10 million contract to build Liberty V12 aircraft engines, breaking ground on the Lincoln Motor Company Plant. To build the Liberty engines, Lincoln sourced parts from other manufacturers; along with cylinders produced by Ford, other parts were sourced from Buick, Cadillac, Marmon, and Packard. In total, 6,500 Liberty V12 engines were produced by Lincoln before the end of World War I ceased wartime production.
In March 1986, the design freeze for the project occurred, with an intended production start of mid-1989. The second-generation Lincoln Town Car would become the first domestic Ford vehicle engineered outside of the company and constructed by foreign suppliers, with International Automotive Design of Brighton, England handling the engineering, while Japan-based Ogihara Iron Works supplying all of the Town Car body panels from its own factory near the Wixom plant. To improve quality of prototypes, project managers broke from automotive industry precedent, requiring successive hand-built prototypes to be built to production-level quality to determine the locations and causes of specific issues of tooling and manufacturing. From 1988 to 1989, the Town Car would go from over a year behind its production date to two weeks ahead of schedule.
In recognition of its importance in automotive history, the Lincoln Motor Company Plant was designated a National Historic Landmark on June 2, 1978. However, nearly all of the plant buildings were demolished in December 2002 and January 2003, including the main Buildings A, B, C, and D. A small portion of the Factory G was retained, as well as other scattered support structures; however, because of the substantial loss of historic integrity the plant's National Historic Landmark designation was withdrawn on April 4, 2005.
The machinery factories came into existence in the course of the Industrial Revolution. Late 18th century most production machines, were still made of wood and manufactured in local workshops. The first industrial factories, such as cotton mills and cotton weavers, started their own workshops, where clockmakers, instrument makers, joiners and cabinet makers were employed to build and maintain the production machines.
The machinery industry produces different kind of products, for example engines, pumps, logistics equipment; for different kind of markets from the agriculture industry, food & beverage industry, manufacturing industry, health industry, and amusement industry till different branches of the consumer market. As such companies in the machine industry can be classified by product of market.
John Wesley Hanes' brother Pleasant H. Hanes founded the P.H. Hanes Knitting Company in 1901. The brothers previously operated a tobacco manufacturing business, that they sold to R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1900. The P.H. Hanes Knitting Company merged with Hanes Hosiery in 1965. The P.H. Hanes Knitting Company complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Consolidated Foods (later renamed Sara Lee) announced its purchase of Hanes in 1978.
Not to be confused with "Lean Design" (copyrighted and patented by Munro & Associates, of Michigan), design for lean manufacturing builds on the set of principles that emerged from design for the customer value and design for manufacturability. Since some lean tools are used in the practice of design for lean manufacturing, it borrows the first word in its name from lean manufacturing as exemplified by the Toyota Production System. Design for lean manufacturing was first coined by Womack, Jones, and Roos after studying the differences between conventional development at American automotive companies and lean methods at Japanese automobile producers. While lean manufacturing focuses on optimization of the production stream and removal of wastes (commonly referred to as muda, mura, and muri) once the value stream has been created, Lean Design ® (Munro & Associates)concerns itself with methods and techniques to create a lean solution from the start, resulting in more value and fewer wastes across the value stream. Lean design ® seeks to optimize the development process through rapid learning cycles to build and test multiple concepts early. Managing the knowledge value stream, systematic problem solving with analysis of the trade-offs between various design options, and solutions generated from ideas filtered by systematic innovation methods are viewed as methods within the lean design process.
After adopting the lean approach, both managers and employees experience change. Therefore, decisive leaders are needed when starting on a lean journey. There are several requirements to control the lean journey. First and most importantly, experts recommend that the organization have its own lean plan, developed by the lean Leadership. In other words, the lean team provides suggestions for the leader who then makes the actual decisions about what to implement. Second, coaching is recommended when the organization starts off on its lean journey. They will impart their knowledge and skills to shopfloor staff and the lean implementation will be much more efficient. Third, the metrics or measurements used for measuring lean and improvements are extremely important. It will enable collection of the data required for informed decision-making by a leader. One cannot successfully implement lean without sufficient aptitude at measuring the process and outputs. To control and improve results going forward, one must see and measure, i.e. map, what is happening now.
Design for lean manufacturing is a process for applying lean concepts to the design phase of a system, such as a complex product or process. The term describes methods of design in lean manufacturing companies as part of the study of Japanese industry by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At the time of the study, the Japanese automakers were outperforming the American counterparts in speed, resources used in design, and design quality. Conventional mass-production design focuses primarily on product functions and manufacturing costs; however,design for lean manufacturing systematically widens the design equation to include all factors that will determine a product's success across its entire value stream and life-cycle. One goal is to reduce waste and maximize value, and other goals include improving the quality of the design and the reducing the time to achieve the final solution. The method has been used in architecture, healthcare, product development, processes design, information technology systems, and even to create lean business models. It relies on the definition and optimization of values coupled with the prevention of wastes before they enter the system. Design for lean manufacturing is system design.
One criticism of lean is that its practitioners may focus on tools and methodologies rather than on the philosophy and culture of lean. Consequently, adequate management is needed in order to avoid failed implementation of lean methodologies. Another pitfall is that management decides what solution to use without understanding the true problem and without consulting shop floor personnel. As a result, lean implementations often look good to the manager but fail to improve the situation.