Life Cycle Oriented Design of Lean Production Systems

The need to continuously adapt production systems to changing market conditions has dramatically increased during the last years. In particular small and medium sized enterprises (SME) are faced with the challenge to develop lean production systems and often struggle to identify and apply appropriate production system design methods. This paper presents a concept that supports SME to identify suitable production system design principles and methods and to implement lean production systems with respect to strategy, product life cycle phases and external change drivers.