lean manufacture, just-in-time approach, total quality management, and total productive maintenance.

Write 9 pages thesis on the topic lean manufacture, just-in-time approach, total quality management, and total productive maintenance. The key competitive factor has become speed. All else being equal, the faster a business responds to its customers, the more profitable it is. The shorter the lead-time in which a manufacturer can supply its products, the higher the probability that it will survive. High-velocity manufacturing is a common goal for all manufacturing businesses. In high-velocity manufacturing, everything is moving. Machines, people, funds, and materials are constantly moving. Therefore, inventories in storage or on the shop floor are moving inventories rather than sitting inventories. Inventories are stocked only for a very short time and will move to other locations only moments after being stocked. The conditions of high-velocity manufacturing include flow manufacturing, line balancing, level schedule, and linearity.

As we have mentioned before, JIT improves the manufacturing system gradually rather than drastically, as in business process reengineering (BPR). This gradual continuous improvement is defined by APICS Dictionary as “one less at a time”: a process of gradually reducing the lot size of the number of items in the manufacturing pipeline to expose, prioritize, and eliminate waste. “One less at a Just-In-Time Manufacturing

time” is a constant, step-by-step methodology for making JIT work in any manufacturing environment. JIT is a never-ending series of small, controlled steps, not one great leap forward. In the JIT philosophy, not the same product is produced over and over again. instead, the same process is used repeatedly to produce different products.

Reducing inventory forces the setup times to decrease for more frequently the products have to be produced to maintain a lower inventory level. In order to have shorter setup times, processes must be designed to be more flexible and workers must be trained to do multiple jobs. The need for shorter setup times also demands that the number of items is fewer.