Lean Manufacturing Implementation in Garment Industry

Garment manufacturing companies now a days facing global competition. Garment manufacturers generally work on the principle of economies of scale. Here, the large fixed costs of production are depreciation-intensive because of huge capital investments made in high volume operations. So, garment industry needs some manufacturing management philosophies like lean manufacturing. The purpose of this work is to investigate the use of lean manufacturing and value stream mapping in the garment industry of Jaipur. In the first stage of study a questionnaire survey was used to explore adoption of lean manufacturing, lean manufacturing tools and techniques used, driving forces and barriers in lean implementation. In the second stage of study a value stream mapping was used to study current state and after studying it a future state map was created to eliminate waste. For elimination of waste takt time was calculated and the cycle time was maintained around the takt time. For value stream mapping the data was collected by means of stop watch time study. The survey results show that many of companies in the apparel industry are not working with lean manufacturing.