Assessing the Levels of Awareness and Implementation Effectiveness of Lean Tools in Furniture Industry: A Case Study Approach
Publication Type
Original research
Authors

The furniture industry faces constant pressure to improve efficiency, reduce costs and maintain product quality. To this end, the furniture industry employs diverse tools in their operations including Lean tools which emphasize waste reduction, process optimization and continuous improvement. This study aims at assessing the levels of awareness, implementation, effectiveness and the future use of Lean tools in Palestinian furniture industry as perceived by its employees. More specifically, a case study of a Palestinian furniture company of 120 employees was selected. A quantitative research method was adopted where the perceptions on Lean tools were collected from a random sample of employees using a self-administered questionnaire. It was found from the analysis that awareness and the future use of Lean tools are of moderate levels, while implementation and effectiveness are, respectively of low and high levels. A real case in the cabinet assembly department of the company was conducted where the states of the department before and after Lean implementation were analyzed. Then, 5S, Just-in-Time and Continuous Flow tools were applied in the department. A set of performance metrics have been measured before and after implementation. The analysis revealed substantial improvements in waste reduction, cost, labor utilization, assembly time and productivity.

Journal
Title
An-Najah University Journal for Research – A Natural Sciences
Publisher
An-Najah National University
Publisher Country
Palestine
Indexing
Scopus
Impact Factor
None
Publication Type
Both (Printed and Online)
Volume
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Year
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Pages
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