Study And Practice In P Company On Production Lead-time Reduction Through Lean Six Sigma

To meet diversified marketing requirements, P Company develops and suppliesthousands types of products, meanwhile difficulties in production arrangement duringmanufacturing process, high stock level and delivery delay have become majorproblems which keeps worrying about the company. The existing study on solutions toshorten the lead time and reduce stocking cost, mainly focuses on adopting VMIwarehouse management to shorten lead time, or applying lean production to eliminatewaste, or using Six Sigma to reshape the processes, but still lacks of study on thecombination of lean production and Six Sigma, which could greatly shorten the leadtime and reduce the inventory cost.The article will go in-depth to analyze P-Company’s current situation on productlead time and stock management, and propose feasible methods to improve it withLean Six Sigma management processes. The first step of the method is to analyzecurrent situation via fish bone diagram and find out the root causes, then analyze thewastes scenarios in the processes with value stream mapping, after that, combine anduse the lean production and Six Sigma theory to gradually eliminate the wastes inproduction process, finally achieve the target of shortening product lead time andreducing inventory cost.This article firstly generalizes the managerial technics of shortening the productlead time, analyzes and compares the merits and demerits of each solution; secondlybring out the technical methods of shortening product lead time with lean six Sigmaprocess; thirdly to put lean six sigma in real practice in P company systematically,finally shorten P company’s product lead time by62%and reduce inventory cost by53%with successful launch of lean six sigma.