The impact of lean improvements on cost-time profile

Abstract

Globalization, competition, the intensity of changes, flexibility, agility, efficiency and effectiveness, profit, market share, cost reducing are imperatives of modern business. Efficient and successful company is the one that manages to produce as much output as possible with less investment. Costs and investments within the production process should be viewed as a dynamic category that follow the flow of money through the life cycle of the business process, and the quantification of results and savings after the implementation of some improvement is very difficult. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of the cost accumulation over the time on the selection of appropriate measures to improve and increase the efficiency of production processes. This effect has been put into the context of lean production, job-shop scheduling and value stream mapping. The cost-time profile contains data only on the movement and accumulation of costs in time and the value-stream map contains data about the entire process with a focus on time, so that the combination of these two tools can significantly facilitate the decision-making process which improvement measures take.