On Heijunka manufacturing system for agricultural products: Application of leanized production management model for agri-businesses

Recognizing recent drastic change of agriculture business environment in Japan happened after the revision of the Japanese Agricultural Land Act enforced in 2009, challenging farmers are trying to learn and implement the way of management developed in Japanese manufacturing industries such as Lean Management Scheme. This study, through investigation of the case agricultural process of a collaborating company, proposes some models of loss visualization with a way of level production (Heijunka) which is a critical concept for coping with customer satisfaction issues and profitable business making simultaneously. In addition, performance of the proposed system is evaluated for its validation through simulation experiments.