الفهرس 
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Abstract
In the current business environment, where flexibility and responsiveness to customer requirements and market changes determine to a far extent the company’s survival, manufacturing companies should turn to the lean manufacturing concepts in order to remain competitive. Simply stated; thinking in terms of lean manufacturing means distinguishing between the value-added and non-value added processes and working to reduce or eliminate the non-value added ones. Lean manufacturing is a systematic approach to identify and eliminate wastes. Adopting the lean manufacturing concepts has become inevitable. It has become a mainstream management philosophy, offering an effective framework for improving efficiency and overall performance. Adopting the lean manufacturing principles can lead to many advantages including higher efficiency, better responsiveness and flexibility, shorter lead times, and lower rework and defect rates. This ultimately reduces the production costs, and is appropriate for current business environment where it is required to produce a portfolio of products with suitable production capacity.
This research describes the process of transforming an assembly line of LED televisions to work with lean concepts. The study has been conducted in the LED television factory in a leading Egyptian firm. A methodology has been developed and used as a framework to utilize various lean manufacturing tools in analyzing the configuration and performance of the assembly line and identify the present forms of waste and their causes. Wastes included high levels of work-in-process that led to high defect rates, frequent inability to meet production targets within regular capacity, lack of flexibility and expensive change over between models were identified.
Lean analysis and waste-elimination tools in parallel with initiating relevant worker training programs have been employed. The study indicated the need to redesign the work arrangements on the assembly line that led to splitting the line into two lines working in parallel while sharing a common furnace operation. Simulation models of the modified (lean) assembly lines were built and used as management decision support tools to investigate further modifications to the lean system to maintain continuous improvement strategies and optimize resources utilization. Experiments with the simulation models showed the potential to eliminate the need to use overtime with the lean assembly lines in addition to the ability to avail more capacity with the current resources.
Converting the assembly line into a lean production system led to cutting off work-in-process by about 82% (from 510,000LE to 90,000LE in monetary value), reducing the cycle time by 30%, and decreasing the model changeover time from 127.5 min to 11.5 min, in addition, having two parallel assembly lines to produce two models concurrently. The new lean system requires less than half (48%) of the original workforce. Remaining workers were assigned to other areas in other production facilities. Moreover, on the new lean system the opportunity for defects were cut off from 30,000 PPM to 1,100 PPM for the TV panel; 23,000 PPM to 18,500 PPM for the printed circuit boards (PCB); and from 45,000 PPM to zero for the front cabinet