Productivity improvement of leather products industry in Bangladesh using lean tools: a case study

There is great potential for the leather industry in Bangladesh to become one of the country's major foreign exchange earners, experts say. After readymade garments (RMG), productivity improvement can help to enrich profit of a leather products industry by minimizing excess work and developing a new method for particular operation. Nowadays, productivity improvement is a popular topic for any kinds of industry. Therefore, improving productivity is one of the main concerns of leather products industries. Lean manufacturing tools are most important tools that can help to increase productivity in leather products industry. In Bangladesh, few industries use these lean tools which can be proved as a real beneficial one. Hence, this study addresses the implementation of lean principles in a leather goods manufacturing industry in order to evaluate present process cycle efficiency (PCE), lead time and productivity prior to developing an improved strategy to bring the improved PCE, productivity and to reduce the lead time. By applying lean tools in the industry at the production line for bi-fold wallet, productivity has been improved by 85.42%. At the beginning state, the PCE was found 38.19% and after the implementation of lean tools, it would be 77.51% and lead time would also be reduced by 46.68% evaluated by takt time, bottleneck analysis, cause-effect analysis and Pareto analysis. The production flow was optimized by minimizing several non-value-added (NVD) activities such as bottlenecking, machine breakdown, queue time, waiting time, material handling time, etc.