The Pros and Cons of Lean Production Methods Being Utilised by an Aircraft Manufacturer

The Benefits and the Possible Disadvantages of Lean Production Methods Being Utilised by an Aircraft Manufacturer

Lean production is the term given to a range of measures traditionally

used by Japanese businesses in an attempt to reduce waste and costs in

production. It is aimed at the elimination of waste in every area of

production. Its goal is to incorporate less human effort, less time to

develop products, less space and to become highly responsive to

customer demand while producing top quality products in the most

efficient and economical manner possible.

Lean production methods being used within an aircraft manufacturer

would have many benefits to the manufacturer, but alongside the

benefits there would also be disadvantages in using these lean

production techniques. Lean production procedures that the aircraft

manufacturer could include Kaizen, the Just-In-Time method also known

as JIT, Cell production and Lean quality.

Kaizen is the Japanese word for 'continuous improvement'. It is a

philosophy that indicates employees have not one job but two, the

first is their set job and the second job is to help continually

improve the business that they are working for. It is a business

strategy that involves everyone in an organization working together to

make improvements without large capital investments.

An aircraft manufacturer would profit from this method as the small

frequent changes would result in less upheaval in training. Also the

small, frequent changes would result in low capital expenditure, but

in the long term these small, frequent changes would increase costs in

both training and capital expenditure, therefore mak...

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negative aspects, but it must be taken into account that a number of

these advantages and disadvantages may balance out in the long term to

become the opposite to what they were originally labelled or even

irrelevant. The aircraft manufacturer may choose to employ several of

the lean production procedures and use them in adjacent to each other.

Another suggestion before deciding on one or more methods of lean

production is for the aircraft manufacturer to use benchmarking.

Benchmarking refers to a business finding the best methods and

processes that are used by other businesses, and then trying to

emulate these in order to become more efficient in its operations. If

this procedure was used by the aircraft manufacturer it could be used

not just for production but in all areas and processes in the

manufacturer.