The impact of lean manufacturing tools towards the process improvement: a study based on reduction of touchpoints of apparel warehouse label quarantine process

Abstract

A warehouse is a service facility which plays a major role in the Supply Chain Management System in an organization. It generates value through its own warehouse practices which creates a competitive advantage to the firm in manufacturing as well as distributing the finished goods (Wiseman, 1988). Internal and External factors such as accurate order fulfillments and delivery, shorter order cycle time, layout design, storage assignment methods, routing methods as well as new trends in manufacturing and warehouse systems, changes in throughputs, customer higher expectations on fast, impact on the warehouse operations in achieving warehouse productivity, to provide better customer service and reduce the lead time and cost (De Koster, 2007, Perera and Kumarage 2013). Due to the inefficiencies and ineffective logistics practices in Sri Lankan warehouse operations such as higher lead time (Dheerasinghe, undated), slotting techniques (Lakmal and Wickramarachchi 2011), impact to the productivity of the warehouse and it generates a significant amount of cost to the Supply chain nearly 23% of GPD. (Central Bank report 2009). Therefore, it is need of the hour to draw attention towards the improvement in Sri Lankan warehouse practices in terms of reduction of cost and lead time in the warehouse practices. Lean manufacturing, six sigma and TQM are few aspects that can be used to improve the warehouse practices in both manufacturing and services organizations. ( Furterer,and Elshennawy, 2005, Goh and Xie 2004).

According to Garcia (2003) successful application of Lean techniques generated more benefits especially in reducing lead time (the unnecessary time part of the order-to-delivery processes), order picking time, and the time for material handling in warehouses practices. Further, it is clear that those advantages can be achieved through the reduction of Non value-added activities and improvement of the warehouse velocity and flow. Also, Phogat (2013) highlighted that the application of lean in warehousing make successful in eliminating waste and generating more value to the customer. (Nystuen 2002) experienced the generating variety of benefits through applying lean manufacturing such as reduction of travel time by 90% and reduction of inventory by 82% and lead time by 11% which can have the possibility to make competition in the market place.

Further in Sri Lankan context lean manufacturing successfully applied in the apparel sector to optimize the warehouse process (Silva et al., 2011 and Wijethunga 2013) successfully by reducing the dock to dock inventory from 30 days to 15 days significantly with the cash cycle on inventories. Therefore, this research article focuses on improving the warehouse process by reducing the touch points (places or points where the human involvement in the process) of the system through the application of the Lean manufacturing tools to improve the flow of the warehouse operations to meet the organizational and customer requirement. Human touch points in a process will make process lengthier one. This study focuses on reducing the human involvement process to improve the process by eliminating unnecessary over process using lean manufacturing tools.