An analysis of relationships and interactions between waste reduction and performance measures in lean manufacturing implementations

Today, the increasing competition along with the changes in market conditions force businesses to engage in customer-focused activities. Therefore, the businesses aiming to keep up with the recent conditions and meet the customer demands on time in full have abandoned the traditional production systems and structured their production systems in line with today's conditions. In this regard, lean production systems adopting customer-oriented principles that may increase the enterprises' competitiveness becomes necessary. Lean production systems, which focus on activities for eliminating all kinds of waste in the production process, target to generate value-creating production processes to ensure enterprises' existence in a competitive environment. Businesses operating with a lean production philosophy must well identify any potential waste that may arise in the production system and design production systems that are capable of creating smart solutions to eliminate waste. This dissertation study aims to identify the correlation and interaction between determined performance criteria and waste types at an enterprise. The correlation between performance criteria and waste types was specified based on a model in the literature. After specification of the correlations, the interaction between the performance criteria and waste type was presented considering the answers given to the waste type -performance criteria evaluation forms by the engineers working for the company, which was the subject of the study. Besides this model, DEMATEL method was also employed to analyze the study data in order to explain better the relation and interaction between the waste types and performance criteria. It is essential for a company to create value in the production process as well as to identify the activities that may cause any waste and come up with solutions to remove such activities from the production system. It has been demonstrated with the analysis results that the model employed in this study was able to identify the interaction and correlation between the company's performance criteria and waste types. Keywords: Lean Manufacturing, Waste Types, Performance Criteria, DEMATEL