Evaluating the Impact of The Lean Approach On a Food Processing Line

Lean is now widely recognized as one the most effective means for increasing competitiveness and improving operational efficiency. Anyway, what could be the benefit in adopting a Lean approach in the food processing industry, is not still clear. For these reasons, the Authors decided to develop an action research, inside a large food company sited in Italy, collaborating with the Plant Technical Support (PTS) unit to verify applicability and benefits of Lean in food processing. According to the action research methodology Authors provided specific expertise to the PTS people developing a simple but practical conceptual model and several research hypotheses. In order to investigate these hypotheses Value Stream Mapping and Discrete Event Simulation have been extensively used. Results confirm some of the generated hypotheses showing interesting improvement areas. Furthermore, PTS people realized that Lean results could be obtained quicker and to a greater extent through the use of simulation technology. As this paper shows, through predictive simulation modelling, the time to implement Lean is greatly reduced and hidden forms of waste become much more apparent.