Process Improvement and Kaizen Study: An Application in a Tire Company

In today's conditions where intense competition conditions are experienced and customer expectations are increasing rapidly, companies have had to constantly increase quality, ensure profitability and reduce costs in all processes. The automotive sector where continuous improvement and renewal takes place in the natural environment also frequently uses improvement methods such as Lean Manufacturing and Kaizen in their processes. Kaizen, which is a combination of the words "KAI" (change) and "ZEN" (better) in Japanese and which is meaning "better change", is a problem-solving approach applied in process development. With Kaizen approach, unnecessary activities are eliminated and low performance processes are being developed. This study describes a Kaizen application in the curing process called “vulcanization” in production department of a tire company is described. The implementation is performed to reduce number of scrap during vulcanization process. As a result, 38.7% improvement was achieved in the scrape rate.