lean production-system

Risks threaten companies in all industries. Especially, if lives are threatened companies have to take measures for risk detection and prevention. The healthcare industry and especially hospitals have to identify risks as early as possible to take measures to protect patients. For this purpose the methods and tools from the lean production system can support hospital employees. Therefore, this paper analyses the support of lean production systems for improving patient safety in hospitals.

Lean Production-Systems (LPS) are widespread especially among the big automobile producers. LPS are company-specific configured systems which optimally coordinate technical, personal, and organisational methods. The implementation and maintenance (of elements) of an LPS requires a certain effort, but provides also many benefits. The effort-benefit relation especially for small and medium-sized enterprises is often not known. This paper allows in this context an overview of how to make this relation transparent as to production factors and size of enterprise.

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.