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CHENNAI, May 17

IN the last few years, the Indian industry has seen a revolution of sorts — any company worth its name has kaizen programmes, in which, basically, workers suggest and effect improvements in whatever they are doing.

Many companies have also `graduated' to taking up TPM or TQM, which has resulted in `TPM' and `TQM' Clubs, under the auspices of bodies such as the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).

TPM (total preventive maintenance) is the name given to the set of techniques applied to ensure that the machines do exactly what is expected of them, and only that.

TQM (total quality management) refers to principles of good process management, such as the process should be capable of exactness in production, the labourers should know what exactly they are required to do and that the production process itself is as transparent as possible.

Now is the time to move on further. The time has come to string together whatever companies have learnt through TPM and TQM and bring in the concept of `lean', which relates to the flow of product along the production process.

`Lean techniques' ensure that the production process itself is kept simple and tight, the product flows quickly from the raw material stage to the finished goods stage without `waiting' anywhere on the line and that the non-value adding activities are reduced to the minimum.

At the `Lean Summit' which is being organised here by the ACMA Centre for Technology (part of the Automotive Component Manufacturers' Association) and the CII, experts urged the Indian industry to adopt lean manufacturing techniques, if only to ensure the industry's own survival in the emerging competition.

Experts from the Lean Enterprise Institute (a non-profit organisation created for spreading lean techniques around the world), Dr Jim Womack and Prof Dan Jones, has said at the Summit that it was a myth that mass production (i.e., economies of scale) could ensure lower cost of production.

If a manufacturing plant is capable of producing small quantities and if the products flow through the process at a high velocity, then the company can produce exactly what the customer wants, and cheaper.

It would work out cheaper because in a lean enterprise, inventories would be kept to the barest minimum and the cycle time would be faster.

Also, lean manufacturing implies using of `lean machines' that can handle small batches, rather than huge, fanciful, hi-tech machines that have a lot of features that the manufacturer does not require.

Dr Womack and Prof Jones are co-authors of two best sellers on `lean manufacturing'— The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. These books, written in 1990 and 1996 respectively, have sold over 4,00,000 copies each.

Dr Womack noted that the `lean manufacturing' concept originated in Toyota Motor Company in the 1960s, but it was not until the 1980s that it was taken note of by the world outside Japan.

Even then, when Japanese car producers were flooding the US market with their products, the Americans were trying to explain it off with various reasons — the Japanese quality was not good and, therefore, the sales would not sustain; the Japanese had a `funny currency', they had the MITI to rig up markets.

However, it was only towards the end of the `80s that an attempt was made to study the Japanese system of manufacturing.

The result was the book called `The Machine that Changed the World'.

That book brought out that there was logic to the Japanese system and it was by no fluke that the Japanese car manufacturers were good.

Also, it was recession time in the US, which jacked up interest among the American car producers in the `new' Japanese technique.

Today, many American companies as indeed several others in other parts of the world are trying to emulate the Toyota Production System, which is known under the name `Lean manufacturing'.

Mr Jan Ferro from Lean Institute of Brazil, spoke of `value stream mapping', which is a part of `lean manufacturing'.

Value stream mapping essentially refers to drawing a map of various steps that take place in a manufacturing process, so as to identify which steps actually add value, and which ones are there just because the process has been so designed. The next step is to eliminate non-value adding steps. The result is a `lean production line'.

Mr Tom Luyster, President, Standard Lean Manufacturing Systems Inc, called upon the 20-odd audience to quell the fear of change and take a plunge into lean manufacturing, without which surviving competition would be difficult.

The experts were all in praise of the Chennai-based Sundaram Clayton for the very lean production system the company has developed.

Describing it as "among the best in the world", they said that Sundaram Clayton was the proof that `lean' could be done in India.

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