Manufacturing Lead-Time Reduction and Knowledge Sharing in the Manufacturing Sector

Abstract

Copyright © 2015 Future Technology Press and the authors. At this time, companies’ need to improve their manufacturing competitiveness in terms of better, faster and cheaper products has led to a range of approaches including ‘just in time’; lead-time reduction; lean manufacture; using social networks; and knowledge sharing, in order to be first to get products and services to customers faster. Companies seek to reduce manufacturing lead-time (MLT) in order to reduce the cost of production; short lead-times are a major source of potential competitive advantage. This paper proposes a study on reducing MLT in factories in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where lead-time has become a major issue for the manufacturing industry. The aim is to provide guidance to industry practitioners and technicians on how to reduce MLT. The paper will present a conceptual framework of the causes and will use knowledge-sharing sources such as social media to survey the factors that have significant impact on lead-time. It will also describe the relationship between setup time, operation time, and non-operation time in order to find potential methodologies that can reduce lead-time in the manufacturing process and identify simple strategies for reducing lead-time.