Performance improvement and cost minimisation for manufacturing components in a fabrication plant by the application of Lean with TRIZ principles

Lean manufacturing is presently an emerging philosophy for reducing the wastages and theory to resolve inventive problems (TRIZ) is an inventive problem solving tool in the times of economic recession. Individually, there have been a lot of papers discussing the implementation of the above concepts. But there has been no report of implementing Lean in TRIZ. To trounce this, a synergistic approach of Lean with TRIZ has been employed. This concept is developed after studying the research reports of Lean and TRIZ separately, and their essence is combined to solve the problems in a better way. Now, as there is an inevitability of reducing the cost of the product, in this paper Lean has been utilised to identify the wastages and TRIZ is used to find the optimal way to reduce wastages by solving the contradictions. This synergistic concept is illustrated with a case study done in a fabrication sector and have visualised improved results.