Writing a Dissertation Report on Lean Manufacturing

Also known as Lean, Lean Management, Lean Production, or Lean Enterprise, Lean Manufacturing is a set of tools, techniques, and principles that many companies or industrial organizations implement to enhance production efficiency. Lean Manufacturing enhances overall customer value while eliminating waste or keeping it at a bare minimum.

While Lean Manufacturing is a very common concept in supply chain management and Manufacturing, it is applicable as a philosophy to all industry organizations. If you want to learn how to write a dissertation report on lean Manufacturing, then look no further than myhomeworkwriters.com. My Homework Writers is the best online essay help service at the disposal of students. At My Homework Writers, students can access lean management articles, a lean manufacturing abstract, numerous lean manufacturing research topics, or even have an expert create a dissertation report on Lean Manufacturing for them.

The primary aim of lean Manufacturing is to supply high-quality commodities to many consumers at significantly lower prices. By doing this, organizations can eventually lead entire societies to greater prosperity. The main justifications behind lean Manufacturing are waste elimination in the production process, incorporating quality into production processes, minimizing costs, and creating lean tools that will enhance functional performance in organizations.

Dissertation papers are long pieces of academic writing that students submit as part of their post-graduate or undergraduate degrees. The source material of dissertations has to be original research. While the structure of dissertations varies depending on a student’s field, they usually contain four or five chapters.

Common Dissertation Structure

Introduction to the Topic

This consists of a brief presentation of the topic or issue in question. In addition, the introductory section should provide background information on the motive behind the thesis paper. Some interesting topics in a dissertation report on lean Manufacturing include:

• A lean manufacturing case study in the USA
• How to eliminate waste in lean Manufacturing.

Literature Review

This section is the theoretical basis of your dissertation report on lean Manufacturing. In this section, you should establish the basic concepts and principles behind all practical implications you will examine in subsequent chapters. Some examples of theoretical cores for a dissertation report on lean Manufacturing include:

• Lean Manufacturing: a literature survey
• Value Stream Mapping: literature review

Methodology Explanation

This section of your dissertation report on lean Manufacturing consists of the methodology of your analysis. It should also include comments on the availability of data sources and the rationale behind your selection of specific patterns of analysis.

Overview of Research Results

Within this section of your dissertation report on lean Manufacturing, provide an overview of the outcome of your literature review. Couple this overview with an analysis of your case study for more completion.

Discussion of Results and What They Imply

Discuss all the meaningful observations of your analysis in this section.

Conclusion

While most students rush through this section, make sure your dissertation report on lean Manufacturing demonstrates the contributions of your research. This section should conclude the analysis while providing suggestions for extensive research on your dissertation paper’s topic.

Sample Dissertation Report on Lean Manufacturing Structure

To paint a clearer picture of how you can write your dissertation report on lean Manufacturing, we provide a sample structure below. The structure is not exactly a complete dissertation report but rather a concise guide on how to create dissertation reports in the future. Our hypothetical topic is the impact of lean manufacturing and process industries.

Introduction

2018 is the 10^th year since the global economic crisis of 2008. This decade saw the stabilization of global markets and the collapse of both industrial production and consumer demand. In uniquely occurring incidents, companies all over the world had unbearable quantities of inventory, which they could not dispose of due to rapidly dropping sales levels.

Up to this point in time, production rates have never been what they were before the crisis broke out. However, the past two years have seen a stable, rising trend. During times of economic recession, the industrial world should focus more on re-engineering processes for efficiency rather than traditional methods of cost reduction, e.g., wage cuts.

The principal objective of this dissertation is to provide a theoretical guide for understanding the basic methods and concepts of Lean Manufacturing. It also provides key tenets that either impede or promote beneficial outcomes after the implementation of lean manufacturing principles in process industries.

Theory

This chapter forms the theoretical framework of our dissertation report on lean Manufacturing. It presents the basic tools and principles of Lean Manufacturing and implementation elements from different academic sources.

What Is Lean?

Also Known as Lean Management, Lean is a set of tools, techniques, and principles that companies and industrial organizations implement to enhance production efficiency. The ultimate aim of Lean Manufacturing is to eliminate waste from production processes while providing overall value to as many consumers as possible.

Since lean focuses on continuous improvement, its introduction into businesses happens gradually in phases.

Lean Tools

To actualize the benefits of lean philosophy, organizations can use a set of lean tools. The tools come in three categories of production processes, methods, and quality.

Quality lean tools contribute to an improvement in the quality organizations offer to consumers. The most popular quality lean tools are Kaizen, Total Productive Maintenance i.e. TPM, and Poka-Yoke.

Production process tools help in making production processes more efficient. Some popular production process tools are JIT, production smoothing, and cellular Manufacturing.

Lastly, method lean tools help to optimize the overall operations within production facilities. Some effective method lean tools include setup reduction time, line balancing, and work standardization.

Formulating Research Hypotheses

Through reclassification of process industries and their various sectors, organizations can reconsider the implementation of Lean Manufacturing. Organizations can re-evaluate the prevalent idea that lean Manufacturing is only ideal for manufacturing industries, mostly because lean thinking originally came from such an industry, i.e., Toyota automotive.

Stemming from a classification of process industries, the types of products and organization produces could directly allow or limit the implementation of specific lean manufacturing tools. Organizations that use smaller quantities of raw material while producing high volumes of final products, e.g., organizations in the beverage industry, are inherently very efficient. Thus, such organizations do not allow or need tools like standardization and JIT. However, due to extreme dependence on equipment availability and reliability, lean tools like total productive maintenance and Kaizen are beneficial.

Some possible hypotheses therefore are:

• Quality lean tools like Total Productive Maintenance and Kaizen are more suitable for process industries that need less raw materials while producing large volumes of a limited range of products.
• Process industries using dedicated, inflexible machinery cannot incorporate production process lean tools like production leveling- Heijunka and batching.
• Process industries that use flexible, non-dedicated machinery can incorporate method lean tools like SMED, i.e., single-minute exchange die and work standardization.
• Production process lean tools like just-in-time and batching are more suitable for process industries where products become district early on during the production process.
• The implementation of lean manufacturing tools can benefit process industries by either increasing overall performance rates or reducing waste and/or the required resources.

Methodology

This chapter describes the tools and methods for structuring and supporting the arguments of the thesis problem. It also describes the methods of testing the hypotheses in the previous chapter, i.e., theoretic analysis.

To examine how valid the hypotheses are, you first conduct a literature review of different academic journals. After this, acquire data from specific company facilities using semi-structured and interpersonal questionnaire interviews as part of the case study. This will help provide further support for the arguments from prior journal reviews.

Literature Review

The initial part of your dissertation report on lean Manufacturing should consist of a literature review. The rationale behind providing this critical literature review is to provide clear insights into the issue under examination. Additionally, it helps present important elements of your research as well as various contemporary trends or areas of interest for potential future researchers. Therefore, gather information from a broad range of academic journal articles as well as books at the beginning of your research.

Limitations of Study Periods

Depending on the kind of information you require for your research, you can choose to set a limitation on the period of study or not. On matters of lean Manufacturing, most researchers choose to avoid setting limitations on publishing periods of books and journals they use for research.

However, factoring in the relatively late adoption of lean manufacturing practices in process industries, and the rapid changes in production processes, there is an issue in gathering relevant data. Such data is often available in more recent scientific papers.

Nature of Literature Review

A literature review can be either inductive or deductive. A deductive approach involves research that occurs on a theoretical basis, which is then subject to evaluation via data analysis.

An inductive approach, on the contrary, involves reasoning from concrete facts to general rules or principles. The inductive approach occurs when a researcher gathers sets of data, and the ultimate goal is to explain it using a newly proposed theory that relates to the existing literature.

Interview: Interpersonal and Questionnaires

Interviews are essential for gathering data during research. They can be unstructured, semi-structured, or fully structured. Using fully structured interviews, you have to redefine and standardize all the questions you intend to ask the interviewee.

In semi-structured interviews, you only need to determine a set of topics to discuss during the interview. The actual setup of your questions, and how you order and present them will depend on the conductor’s attitude. Lastly, unstructured interviews are more or less similar to open dialogues with minimal limits. Besides the general theme of the conversation, there are no limits to such an interview.

Case Study Analysis

A case study is a tool that answers the questions of what, why, and how, in the context of a thesis. For a smooth research process, plan your case study analysis and conduct it to support your findings from real-world data and theoretical reviews. For example, a case study can answer the question, “what is the impact of lean manufacturing and process industries?”

Results

For your thesis, you can choose to employ various databases as your sources of information. A good example of such a database is Google scholar, which is freely accessible for scholarly literature in various disciplines. This database is particularly useful due to its efficacy and continuous improvement via advanced algorithms that find the best papers in various subjects within the research scope.

To enhance ease of interpretation for everyone who eventually goes through your dissertation provide diagrammatic analyses of the data you gather. This can be in the form of bar graphs, pie charts, tables, line graphs, or whatever seems convenient, contingent on the data in question.

For instance, you can include a year-wise distribution of lean implementation across process industries that you were analyzing for purposes of the thesis. An excellent way of expressing such a distribution is through bar graphs, which consolidate significant amounts of data in an easy-to-understand format. Also, provide a comprehensive case study analysis from both your literature sources and the interviews.

Discussion

In this chapter, analyze the findings from both your interview-based case study and literature-based case study. Discuss and connect all your findings to the theoretical framework of your dissertation. The information you gather from journals can provide an excellent overview of different characteristics you observe between various sectors or segments that belong to similar sectors within the process industries.

For example, using the results from the case study analysis on scholarly literature, you can deduce that among the prime reasons for lean manufacturing implementation across the process industry is improving not only productivity but also enhance the entire production process. You can then compare data from your observations to a literature case study analysis to establish a correlation.

Lastly, test and validate your hypotheses from earlier on.

Conclusion

In this section, provide a concise recap of the entire dissertation. Also, include some answers to your research hypotheses. Your answers should provide meaningful solutions to your hypotheses. Other important sections worth including are the limitations of the study, implications and contributions, and potential for future research.