Teaching Lean Manufacturing Principles In A Capstone Course With A Simulation Workshop

Traditionally, improvements in manufacturing costs have been achieved by capital investments in new equipment intended to the lower manufactured costs per unit. Often, the new equipment was designed to achieve the lower costs through faster production speeds, more automation, etc. Typical focus was on pieces per minute and often gave inadequate consideration to size of production runs, changeover times and inventory carrying costs. Many times, the new automated, higher speed equipment required lengthy changeovers before a different product could be run, resulting in management believing the most cost-effective practice was long production runs (large batch sizes).