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Taher Omran TourkiFull time studentLean manufacturing in the Cement IndustryAbstract:Cement industry has vital role on global economy since it provides the basic input to the construction industry that carried out by private and public sectors. The cement production process is intensive energy and materials where 1.6 tonne of raw materials, about 7.500 MJ, and 130 Kw/h are consumed to produce one tonne of cement. The demand for cement is mostly second substance behind water, where the annual production rate is 1.5 billion tonnes. This industry is characterised by large stockpiles of the raw materials, large work-in-progress inventories between individual cement making processes, and low utilisation of capacity. Cement production process is a complex continuous process industry, and any failure or breakdown happen within a single operation can result in shut down of the whole plant. This means problems within particular operation may be resulted from complex interrelationship between hidden roots within previous operations. Many aspects which are counted as resources of waste and non-value added activities such as: high level of inventories, low efficiency and productivity, and maintenance task which costs about 25% of the total of production costs. Consequently, a little improvement at any making process will enhance the whole plant’s performance. Implementation of Lean Manufacturing techniques helps many organisations to improve their productivity and efficiency, and eliminate or reduce the non-value activities. Adoption of lean practices can help the cement industry in moving from mass production to be lean, increasing the efficiency, the overall performance, and reducing inventories levels and production costs. Past works have examined the cement industry and its individual processes and capacity needs. However, no research has examined these processes in relation to the variety of problems that may effect process utilisation. The situation of not achieving the expectation of trouble free operation processes has motivated the undertaken research to design an integrated framework. This framework will be used in order to identify, eliminate, and prevent the generic problems that may occur within cement industry. The undertaken study aims at developing an automatic integrated methodology, which is combined of the Lean Manufacturing principles, Root Cause Analyses methods, and discrete event simulation software. This combination methodology focuses on operations-based issues that effect process capacity. It would be also capable to analyses and examine all collected and generated data in order to highlight the potential hidden roots cause the problems.
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