Value stream mapping and a design based on Conwip system

The trend in today?s competitive environment is to provide high quality low priced diverse products and quick response to customer demands. Under these competition conditions, only term to be existing and sustain this existence is running ahead always. In order gain a sustainable competitive advantage over the rivals, organizations need to be open to new changes, innovations and challenges. In order to become a worldwide company, an effective simplification of workflow and elimination of waste must be the targets for all manufacturers. Thus; business organizations should absorb these new organizational systems, techniques and technologies into their structures. Contrarily, they unlikely become far away from current competition if they don?t accept. By the light of these truths, lean production approach which is first implemented by Japan automotive corporation Toyota Motor Company has also recognized by the American automotive corporations and they have implemented this concept. Recently, most of the enterprises have been implemented this approach. The core of the system is, eliminating non-value adding operations, operators and material in order to maximize performance. By aiming continuous development and removing all system wastes, this system isn?t applied only in production environments but also in service environments. For industrial organizations, the only aim is to be more profitable. In order to become more profitable organization for a long-term, it?s needed to turn towards competitive organizations targets. There are many factors that affect to compete. The most important one among these is quality of products and services. The quality expectation of customers is differentiating and getting radical changes. No more main concerns are about only finished goods. Quality at every production steps becomes more important than any time. Value stream management is a technique to see all the actions of an enterprise from holistic view and realize the lean transformation. Value Stream Mapping is a way to allow users to understand where they are and what wasteful acts need to be eliminated. In another words, value stream mapping is used to see value, waste, and also the sources of waste in a value stream. In this paper, a value stream mapping study as a project to achieve lean manufacturing has been carried out to meet customer?s expectations in UZEL Co., one of the biggest companies in the world for tractor manufacturing sector. The results of this study, outlining improvements and expected benefits, are proposed. Keywords: Value Stream Management, Value Stream Mapping, Lean Product