Enhancing the Productivity of Manufacturing Systems using Lean Six Sigma – A Case Study in the Shaving Industry

Abstract

Enhancing and sustaining productivity of manufacturing systems could be achieved through efforts directed towards reducing production costs, improving operational efficiency, and minimizing production losses. Among the many available tools for reducing losses, Lean Six Sigma (LSS) has been successfully applied to many manufacturing and service industries. With the overarching goal of this research to improve the productivity of manufacturing systems, this work considers the impact of using the LSS methodology in identifying and reducing production losses that hinder the productivity of a manufacturing system within a shaving products company in Egypt. More specifically, this work applied the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control) methodology to identify current issues with a specific manufacturing process within the company and assess the impact of a few hypothetical improvement scenarios. Using the well-known Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) metric, a comparison before and after scenarios implementation was conducted. Overall, the OEE metric improved by a range of 6.41% to 31.31% within the studied interval, depending on the scenario considered. Future work will include additional improvement scenarios and more in-depth analysis; yet, the presented work can be considered as an initial step to assist manufacturers with better decision-making and to enhance existing manufacturing systems.