Development of Integrated Lean-TQM Pillar as a part of Excellence Program for a global Material Handling Equipment Manufacturer

The company in which this thesis work is carried out, happens to be a leading material handling solution provider globally. Company has 15+ manufacturing plants across four continents, with comprehensive product range including equipment for Bulk Solids Handling & Processing, Dust Filtration, Wastewater Treatment and Renewable Energy Generation. The company’s aim is to produce market-oriented solutions turning them into a particularly user-friendly standard, tailored for a variety of industries, company intends to focus and invest on continuously improving Industrial Quality & offer excellent product price-performance ratio . Although, company is currently one of the leading players in the market, in order to sustain and grow in the market, the company has taken up global ‘Excellence Program’, which is an integrated model that aims at optimizing, implementing and promoting continuous improvement of the fundamental factors – Quality, Cost, Delivery. This program constitutes of six basic pillars namely, Workplace Organization, Logistics & Supply Chain, Integrated Lean – TQM (Total Quality Management), Production Reliability, Product & Process Development, Continuous Development & Skill Development. The third pillar: Integrated Lean – TQM is the scope of this thesis. TQM & Lean Production (LP) are two prominent and widely adopted manufacturing methodology worldwide, and in this thesis, the main intention is to harness the potential of synergies that the integration of TQM & LP has to offer. Here, this pillar is structured in the form of 10 basic Q-Principles which are clear, concise, easy to implement, easy to understand, easy to assess & focus mainly on Manufacturing quality. Q-Principles defined here are based on my previous work experiences, knowledge gained from academic courses (Analysis & Management of Production Systems, Quality Engineering), external research (regarding TQM & Lean Principles) and on the relevance to the production environment, work culture & Product segment of the company. The main thought process behind defining these basic principles is that the majority of defect root causes and defect propagation can be avoided/eliminated by following basic value stream quality disciplines. For each defined principle, a brief description, Implementation steps, Targets, required forms/Templates, Examples (if necessary) and Responsibilities will be laid out. This pillar mainly aims at eliminating Value stream weaknesses (especially human errors) and promote Continuous Improvement Quality mindset with the key objective of delivering defect free products to customer. Although, implementation part is out of scope for this thesis as it will be a long-term yearly planned step-by-step approach, but upon global implementation, the tangible benefits expected are Increased process efficiency & effectiveness, Increased product quality, Reduced Internal (rework/repair, scrap) and External (Customer claims) defect costs.