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fying and eliminating wastes is referred to as a continuous improvement strategy in TPS. Therefore, this manufacturing philosophy aims directly to attack any form of waste in the production process through continuous improvement in pursuit of perfection. TPS best practice has brought lean approach becoming the most productive approach in the manufacturing industry. It has become the general case of lean manufacturing these days. The values of the system and its strategies have proven to global manufacturing industry and a considerable number of manufacturing companies are keen to adopt this model to their own production systems (Papadopoula and Ozbayrak, 2005).

2.1 Lean Manufacturing in HVLV Facilities

Although lean manufacturing can be a universal tool for all manufacturing companies, lean strategies and techniques in TPS, may not fit to all types of manufacturing companies. According to a lean practitioner in the team who has more than 15 years of lean manufacturing experience in both low-variety high-volume and high-variety low-volume environments, Lean Manufacturing and TPS are terms that can be referred interchangeably but they may not be interchangeable. TPS is suited for manufacturing companies in a low-mix high-volume environment where flow patterns are simplified and recognized and flow line layouts are most suitable for these companies. In a HVLV environment, most manufacturing companies are job shops. Their products are wide variety and their production volumes are very small compared to the manufacturing environment in which TPS was developed. Adopting TPS to these HVLV manufacturing companies without properly adapting to the environment would not give maximum result out of the system.

The adaptation of the layout when implementing lean manufacturing in most manufacturing companies has traditionally been done by converting from the existing functional layouts to cellular layouts. However, practitioners have found that it is not advised to completely convert the functional layout of a job shop operating in a HVLV environment into a cellular layout. The main reason is that the inherent inflexibility of manufacturing cells cannot adapt to changing capacity requirements (machine and labor), product mix, and demand volume. (Smart Khaewsukkho 2008).

2.2 Four Key Production System Characteristics:

2.2.1 Mix

Mix refers to the number of different products that are produced within a certain production system. What makes one product “different” from another? One answer is the end product differences, such as number of parts, functionality, appearance, etc. This definition is not very useful; however it is helpful for the purpose of understanding mix within the production system.

A more appropriate method of understanding product differences is to compare the different processes or steps that products must take as they move through production and the difference in processing time at each step. Two products may look different to the customer, but if they are produced with identical routings through the plant, require no setups from one product to the next, and require identical proce本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。