Research On Lean-thinking-based Business Process Improvement Of Hamilton-Sundstrand Industrial (shanghai) Co., Ltd

Over the years, the collaboration among different enterprises or various functions within the same enterprise is a difficult problem that plagues the operational efficiency of many enterprises'business activities and processes. Problems such as executions out-of-line with the process, untimely handled tasks and poor work efficiency have greatly impaired the efforts of enterprises to improve their competitiveness.Since Toyota began to promote lean manufacture, lean thinking and its principles have been widely applied in the production process of many global companies. However, an business process withour material or product, the work efficiency is still relatively low. Although we have theoretical basis and abundant practical lean manufacture experiences, the absence of concrete materials makes it difficult to use specific indicator measuring the lean production process , such as delivery time, takt time(Beat), inventory, to measure business processes. Therefore, these problems must be solved to apply lean thinking and its principles in business processes improvement.In fact, lean principles and thinking can be applied to the improvement of business processes. This project has made endeavours and researches on how to analyse business processes, to find out opportunities for improvement and carry out process improvement by using lean thinking and principle through the practices of Hamilton-Sundstrand Industrial (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. The specific measures are to analyze the process status and improvement requirements by researching the customer expectation (takt time), delivery time, waiting time, inventory and equilibrium of business processes, and by using the lean thinking and principle of manufacture strategies, single-point scheduler, flow(pull, one-piece flow and Kanban), equalization, timely (within the takt time) error correction, and reduction of eight typical wastes, at the same time to finally succeed in accomplishing lean business process which greatly shortens the delivery time of business work and improves the efficiency of business processes. The effects of lean thinking and principle for efficiency improvement of business processes are no less than those of lean thinking and principle for manufacturing processes.Assistance of electronic process to ensure smooth information transmission is a key factor to achieve lean business processes. Combining the lean thinking and principles with electronic workflow and applying it to the improvement of business processes are an innovative trial of this project. By implementing process management system composite of Web services– K2.NET, which is based on Web services and workflow technology, the electronic workflow will be suitable for business process management engine featuring multi-participant, cross-function platform and dynamic environment, and provides a e-commerce tool which can be flexiblely modified and have diverse settings.By applying lean principles and thinking with help of electric process, we have achieved great improvement for the business process that we studied. Lead Time has decreased from 1906 minutes to 370 minutes after improment. Other indicators of of business process also improve much. It can be concluded that lean principles and thinking should play an important role in business process improvement.