This research addresses the application of lean manufacturing concepts to the continuous production/ process sector with a focus on the steel industry. The goal of this research is to investigate how lean manufacturing tools can be adapted from the discrete to the continuous manufacturing environment, and to evaluate their benefits on a specific application instance. Although the process and discrete industry share several common characteristics, there are areas where they are very different. Both manufacturing settings have overlap, but at the extreme, each has its unique characteristics. This research attempts to identify commonalities between discrete and continuous manufacturing where lean techniques from the discrete side are directly applicable. The ideas are tested on a large steel manufacturing company (referred to as ABS). Value stream mapping is used to first map the current state and then used to identify sources of waste and to identify lean tools to try to eliminate this waste. The future state map is then developed for a system with lean tools applied to it. To quantify the benefits gained from using lean tools and techniques in the value stream mapping, a detailed simulation model is developed for ABS and a designed experiment is used to analyze the outputs of the simulation model for different lean configurations. Generalizations of the results are also provided.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-05282003-114851 |
| Date | 03 September 2003 |
| Creators | Abdullah, Fawaz Mohammed |
| Contributors | G.G. Hegde, Harvey Wolfe, Bopaya Bidanda, Kim LaScola Needy, Jayant Rajgopal |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu:80/ETD/available/etd-05282003-114851/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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