Şirin, Muhammed Sabri; Güzel, Dılsad; Kabakus, Ahmet Kamil

Lean manufacturing is a production strategy that has been usedsince 1950's. The main concern of this strategy is to determine resource of wasteand try to eliminate waste. Companies do not only eliminate waste but also theytry to keep their competitiveness as high as their competitors. Lean manufacturinghas some tools such as Value Stream Mapping, Kanban, Kaizen, 5s, CONWIPetc. to imply over the production system to enhance its effectiveness. The aim ofthis paper is to apply Value Stream Mapping to improve production line of atextile company through a case study. Value stream mapping (VSM) is one ofthe most used lean manufacturing technique for illustrating and analyzing thelogic of a production process and it provides companies to monitor all productionline systematically. Value stream mapping is a projection of the flow ofcomponents and materials through a supply chain in an organization as well asthe flow of information. The main idea of VSM is to control the system as awhole. In this paper, VSM was used to demonstrate the present production lineand imply lean techniques. Selected company is a textile producer which exportstheir products from Istanbul to European countries. 5S principles were applied toreduce lead times and to increase productivity. Final results show that ProductionLead Time (PLT) decreased 14.5 days to 5.2 days by applying lean techniques.