Value Stream Mapping in a Local Food Production Firm: Strategic Optimization using Lean Manufacturing

Small scale food industries are labor intensive and requires a lot of time. As an essential element of the food supply chain, they play a significant role in the local economy. Because they provide specialized products to markets wherever operational superiority is vital. This project purpose is to improve firm's total efficiency by recognizing and removing various sources of waste in terms of process time. Solar poly drying is a new drying technique introduced in this work. The main disadvantage in the traditional method of drying is that, it takes a long time to dry the product. The need for drying modification provides the firm with a competitive market price for the products. Lean practice is a popular method for reducing waste and cost. As a lean technique, value stream mapping is used to display material, information flows, and the overall time required for the processes. According to the results of this research, value stream mapping is an effective lean technique for identifying improvement areas, and layout enhancement contributed in achieving overall efficiency and the implementation of solar drying technique resulted resulted in reduction of lead time.