Lean Production Principle for Improving Productivity: Empirical Case Study in Garment Industry in Ethiopia

Lean production has been industrialized in manufacturing industry in the Global North on account of delivering quality products.The industry in the Global South on the other hand is facing problems that could easily be minimized using the production principle.This paper is organized to adapt lean production for improving productivity of garment industry in Ethiopia.The target is to alleviate variety between company's productivity and customer demand.Shop floor visit, questionnaire survey, and focus group discussion-based data mining approaches have been used for this purpose.The qualitative part was used to map out baseline data of existing manufacturing process whereas the quantitative part was aimed to construct empirical findings obtained from qualitative organization.Aggregate results accordingly show that there are substantial lean wastes such as longer lead time, high WIP inventory, longer routes, and unutilized resources.It has been meanwhile renown that if appropriate lean production tools have framed and implemented, the impact of these wastes could meaningfully be minimized and a smooth process flow can be ensured.For instance, a lead time for a single round neck t-shirt in the case study has shown an improvement of 18.3% and a 3.9% improvement of resource utilization.