The adoption of Kanban, a lean manufacturing method : a case study of a Colombian company

The economic slowdown that are facing the countries in Latin America and also the crisis in others, should not be seen as a threat, but as an opportunity to generate and to motivate meaningful changes in the way we had been doing the things. Companies need to adapt their manufacturing processes in order to become more competitive at a local level and even more important at an international one. This brings to us the relevance and importance of studying Lean manufacturing and center in the value and pertinence of Kanban adoption thorough a case study. This empirical research is based on Yazaki Ciemel, a company in Colombia, which is a developing country. Yazaki Ciemel operates within the auto-parts sector, they produce harnesses for automotive since 1968, but only few years ago they started to think about improving their processes and implementing Kanban. This work aims to document, analyze and understand how is the Kanban adoption process developed; which implies making a literature review in order to understand what is Kanban, what is Lean manufacturing, which are the production planning systems; but also in this work we will analyze in practice which ones were the drivers and motivations for Yazaki Ciemel to embrace this change in the production process, what did this change involved within the company, how was the whole process handled, relating the different stages and the most important thing, inside the process what challenges emerged and which ones were the gains, benefits and lessons learnt.