Benchmarking Technique in Lean Manufacturing (5s) Practice

Abstract

In today’s competitive market, low cost production and high quality product could assists manufacturers to win new and maintain their existing customers thus gain bigger market share. Manufacturing cost is one of the key dominant factors towards achieving business success. As such, manufacturing firms are struggling to produce product with lowest manufacturing cost while at the same time maintaining their product quality. Lean manufacturing practice could be applied to lower the manufacturing cost and benchmarking technique to ensure on the implementation effectiveness. A case study was conducted in a small and medium manufacturing firm located in China. One of the lean manufacturing tools, i.e. 5S system was implemented in the production line of the case study company. For future reference, the present situation was studied prior to the 5S system implementation. Later, the result of the study was benchmarked against before, after and the best in class manufacturer. A framework was developed to guide the user during implementing the 5S system. The benchmarking result shows significant improvement in productivity and lower manufacturing cost after implementing the 5S system. The implementation of 5S system had created more comfortable workspace to production workers, standard procedures and method to produce the product. Therefore, it can be concluded, the 5S system was able to help the production workers to implement the lean manufacturing and benchmarking technique more effectively to bring additional advantages in producing lower cost and high quality product, which eventually helps the company to gain better market share.