Leanness evaluation using IF-THEN rules.

Lean manufacturing is a manufacturing system aimed at waste elimination thereby streamlining the process. Leanness is the performance measure of lean manufacturing. The measurement of leanness necessitates fuzzy logic, due of the existence of impreciseness and vagueness. The calculation of leanness using fuzzy logic manually is a time consuming and highly repetitive job. To overcome this, fuzzy logic-based inference method has been attempted in this research study. A conceptual model consisting of three levels namely enabler, criterion, and attributes has been developed. Then the linguistic variables are assigned and the membership functions are defined. Leanness level has been computed using IF-THEN rules based interface method. This is followed by gap analysis to identify the weaker criteria. Then suitable proposals have been derived to overcome these obstacles towards leanness improvement of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]