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However, the ultimate aim of lean manufacturing is to reduce these wastes to zero, but for the start, the items are chosen which will reduce the largest amount of waste. Lean manufacturing includes a gamut of techniques such as JIT delivery from the suppler and the customer, creating a kanban flow in production, Poka yoke, 5 S, SMED, etc.

The degree of applicability of lean manufacturing techniques in various industries depends upon a number of factors. Four factors are critical for identifying the degree of application of lean manufacturing techniques: -
1. Raw Material Variety
2. Product Volume
3. Equipment Arrangement and Flexibility
4. Time of transformation of non-discrete units into discrete units, during the production process

Low volume, high variety companies have been typically involved in lean production because of the requirements of quick change-overs, and thus, satisfying the changing customer demand. Automobile industry was the first to take up lean production because of the large number of parts in each automobile. Other types of industries, for example, the ones having high volume and low product variety, or having specialized machinery, complain that there is little applicability of lean production techniques to their environment. Nevertheless, if these industries don't think about implementing the techniques directly (JIT, Kanban, 5 S, Production Smoothing) but rather look at the basic principle of lean production, i.e., reducing the waste present in the system, there are very bright prospects from gaining by applying lean manufacturing in these industries. Similar is the case of software and the service industry where most of the processes do not add value, and are rather redundant from the point of view of the customer.

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* Contributed by -
Aditya Aggarwal & Lalit Kumar Agarwalla,
NITIE, Mumbai.