Application of Value Stream Mapping for Lean Operation: An Indian Case Study of a Dairy Firm

Abstract

In recent times, there has been greater awareness of safety issues, emerging risks and challenges in food supply chain. To this effect, transparency, traceability and information flow have become mandatory to minimize waste in the farm to fork supply chain. Furthermore, value stream mapping is well known for detecting and reducing waste in manufacturing by streamlining value-added (VA) activities, minimizing the non-value-added but essential (NVAE) activity, and removing non-value-added (NVA) activities. The processing time of milk collection, processing, storing and supplying dairy products is obtained from the dairy firm located at Rewari, Haryana (North India). With the help of the processing time of each step, we calculated the lead time for the dairy supply chain. A diagram depicting the process is created to represent the operation’s current status known as current stream map. VA, NVAE and NVA activities are identified inside and between each process, depending on its time and resource consumption. The process is evaluated for the possibility of significantly reducing and simplifying it to the minimum possible steps. By decreasing waste, the process throughput speed increases, and the lead time for the dairy supply chain decreases. Implementing the lean tool reduces lead time by approximately 34.79%.

The Lean Farm: Application of Tools and Concepts of Lean Manufacturing in Agro-Pastoral Crops

“…Examples of productivity results generated by applying tools related to operation function (OF): 99.87% efficiency in rice processing and loading [55], 16.52% reduction in total process lead time [58], and better productivity rates through implementation of LP practices [15,54,56]. The same trend of better results is seen when applying tools related to process function (PF): a 15% increase in rate of surviving shrimp after process quality control [53], reduction in processing lead-time [55,58,59,63,67], elimination of tasks and activities that do not add value to the product or process [63][64][65]; improvement in product quality [59,62]; modeling for optimization of results [5,60]; customer satisfaction [66]; reduction in production costs [61]; and reduction in losses and productivity impacts in a broad way [15,54,56].…”

“…Kumar and Shankar [67] applied the VSM tool to produce dairy foods. In the application, the activities are segregated into three types: those that add value, those that do not add value and are necessary, and those that do not add value.…”

“…All the evaluated publications presented positive results in the evaluated indicators supported by applying the tools. The five LP tools most applied were VSM [54,55,58,59,61,[63][64][65]67], 5S [54,56], Standardized Operation Procedure (SOP) [54,56], Flow Chart [15,63,65], SMED [54,65].…”

“…Table 6 presents the relationship between losses and wastes reduced through implementation of tools proposed by lean production (LP), relating them to process function (PF) and operation function (OF). The impacts of applying lean manufacturing to agropastoral production can be seen in elimination of the following seven main types of waste and losses: Through the presented results, five publications reduce losses in OF [15,[54][55][56]58] and fourteen in PF [15,[53][54][55][56]58,59,[61][62][63][64][65][66][67] through application of LP tools. It is possible to verify that a great part of the applications of LP concepts in agro-pastoral productions is related to process function (PF), wherein better flow of process and material flows for gains in efficiency and productivity are required [34,42].…”

“…The increased shrimp survival rate Economic and Environmental [53] Reduced lead time processing Economic [55,58,59,63,67] Adherence to lean philosophy and tools Economic and Social [15,54,56,57] Improved productivity rates Economic and Social [15,54,56] Improved quality Economic, social, and environmental [59,62] Customer satisfaction Economic and social [66] Optimization of results Economic [5,60] Elimination of non-value-added tasks and activities Economic [63][64][65] Cost reduction Economic and Social [61] 1 Impacts on TBL sustainability concept.…”