Manufacturing/Production
Manufacturing
Manufacturing is the use of machines, tools and labour to produce goods for use or sale. The term may refer to a range of human activity, from handicraft to high tech, but is most commonly applied to industrial production, in which raw materials are transformed into finished goods on a large scale. Such finished goods may be used for manufacturing other, more complex products, such as aircraft, household appliances or automobiles, or sold to wholesalers, who in turn sell them to retailers, who then sell them to end users – the “consumer”.
Production Engineering
Production Engineering is a combination of manufacturing technology with management science. A production engineer typically has a wide knowledge of engineering practices and is aware of the management challenges related to production. The goal is to accomplish the production in the smoothest, most-judicious and most-economical way.
Production engineering encompasses castings, joining processes, metal cutting and tool design, metrology, machine tools, machining systems, automation, jigs and fixtures and die and mould design. Production engineering overlaps substantially with manufacturing engineering and industrial engineering.
Lean Manufacturing
Lean Manufacturing or lean production, often simply “lean” is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, “value” is defined as any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Basically, lean is centred on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toytotism is also prevalent) and identified as “Lean” only in the 1990’s