Lean Production Education: a Prerequisite Course Designed for Industrial
Engineers in China
Jian-sha Lu, Zhi Pei
Department of Industrial Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China
(ljs@zjut.edu.cn, peizhi82@163.com)
Abstract - Lean production related education has been
integrated in the training programs for undergraduates,
graduates and engineering masters in Zhejiang University of
Technology during the past several years. The fundamental
curriculums are based on the framework of the Toyota
Production System. And developments have been achieved
by introducing modern manufacturing conceptions, with
case studies of real production systems in the local areas. In
this paper, the configurations of the course are
demonstrated, and then a series of in-depth analysis are
performed via the progresses accomplished by the students
engaged in the course. Consequently, from the students’
point of view, a tighter grasp on the knowledge of lean
production after this course enlightens them well into their
future engineering career paths. And that fact reminds the
teaching team that the lean production education is a
prerequisite course in industrial engineering training, and it
should be extended to other colleges and universities in
China.
Keywords - Curriculums, Engineering education,
Education reforms, Industrial Engineering, Lean production
I. INTRODUCTION
As Toyota Production System (TPS)[1] claims itself to
be a successful revolutionary improvement in the area of
factory management and production system optimization,
the framework inherent the system has been widely
spread throughout the world. Meanwhile, Lean
Production (LP) is another way to express the
methodology involved in TPS. And in this paper, for
simplicity, LP is used as the primary terminology. The LP
mode of production has led Japan out of economical
depression in the last century, and poses great impact on
the world economy as well. Since the essence of LP is
largely within the domain of industrial engineering (IE)
subject, for the aim of better understanding of the
knowledge in modern manufacturing systems, a course
titled Lean Production is organized in Zhejiang University
of Technology (ZJUT).
The education of industrial engineering in China is
experiencing a tremendous reform in the present time [2-5].
The domestic prestigious universities, such as Tsinghua
University, are conducting programs of importing
photocopies of foreign textbooks into the undergraduate
courses. It is undeniable that the major of industrial
engineering is more advanced in the developed countries,
e.g. the USA[6-10], Europe[11-14] and Japan. To embrace the
advantages of the IE discipline in operational research and
operations management, a better understanding of the
foreign advancement should be accomplished. Compared
with the photocopied textbooks in Tsinghua University,
we composed our own textbook[15] based on the TPS
developed in Japan. The textbook is written in Chinese,
and the prototypes of the production systems discussed
are automobile manufacturing systems located in No.1
automobile manufacturer in China. The textbook consists
of the several most important sectors mentioned in LP
framework, such as the pull & push production systems,
JIT, one-piece flow, TPM, SOP and VSM. Since the LP
course is designed for the senior undergraduate students
majored in industrial engineering or above, and they
already have solid background knowledge in mechanical
engineering and operational research, thus this course is
more of a comprehensive training for the impending
engineering design and improvement jobs in a real
production system.
To fully convey the configurations and specialties of
this LP course, this article is divided into the following
segments. In the second section, a description of the LP
course is depicted; In the third section, the effects of
learning this course are revealed; And in the fourth
section, several possible prospects of the current teaching
methods are open for discussion; Finally, the fifth section
concludes the paper.
II. THE CURRENT LP COURSE
The location of ZJUT is in Hangzhou, where the
aforementioned LP course is given. And it is in the east
coast province of China, where the manufacturing plants
are widely spread, and people there are fervent in
operating businesses. Therefore, it is an urgent call upon
our educators in local universities, which is how to impart
students with the state-of-the-art scientific management
methods. Also, most undergraduates in ZJUT discontinue
in pursuing higher diplomas, and the job seeking after
graduation is their first choice. Thus the knowledge of LP
becomes a prerequisite to the requirements of the local
employers.
The curriculum is set in the first semester of the
senior year for college undergraduates, and the first year
for the graduates and engineering masters. The students
are required to attend a 90 minute lesson once every week.
And the quality of the study is guaranteed by the assigned
homework every three weeks, and random pop-up quizzes.
1) Contents: As was mentioned in the first section,
the contents of this LP course have twelve key sectors of
the LP framework. Each of these components is imparted
in a separate lesson, such as in the first lesson we
introduce the general guidelines of the LP course to
prepare the students with the upcoming semester. During
the first class, students attend this lesson on a voluntary
basis, which means they could drop this course if they are
not interested. However, from the second lesson on, the
attending students should be obliged to complete the
course to get credits. Therefore, it is quite tricky for the
teaching team in dealing with the first lesson. In which it
should be interesting enough to attract the students, but
also let those unqualified students realize the difficulty. In
the following weeks, the LP course is organized as the
actual operational styles in the automobile plants. For
example, the concepts of JIT and the principles of Kanban
systems are introduced in the second lesson. These tools
are core components and very typical for a mature LP
based manufacturing system, but still many factories in
Zhejiang province and throughout China have not
recognized their importance. So in the following weeks,
the detailed description of how to implement the Kanban
systems, the balanced manufacturing, the one-piece flow
production and so on are imparted.
2) Format: The LP course is given with a series of
multimedia courseware prepared with careful dedication.
And the tedious calculation processes are accompanied
with animated movies, the hard to remember production
conceptions are combined with actual scenes taken from
the real manufacturing systems. An observation is made
that most of the students in this course are concentrating
on the teaching subjects 80% of the time. Meanwhile,
other unrelated activities are taken place during the class,
hence the teacher should be alerted to such distracted
behavior. As the course organizer, professor Lu himself
has been involved in the consulting programs for many
manufacturing systems, ranging from the chip-set plant to
the refrigerator factory, and from engine plant to the
automobile manufacturer. The experiences possessed by
the teaching force are quite a fortune, because the LP
curriculum is more of a comprehensive application level
course, and the case studies introduced here will serve as
an enrichment for the students to grasp the key points.
Besides, video clips taken from real manufacturing floor
could be imbedded into the slides, while watching the
video, the students could feel as if they were standing
behind the streamline workers and observing. This video
based education approach works well for the students to
have a deep impression on the abstract production phrases
introduced, and also, as it is demonstrated in the third
section, the students are learning to use downloaded
manufacturing video clips to present their final group
projects.
3) Evaluations: This LP course is set to have one
final examination, four to five times of homework,
randomized pop-up quizzes, project presentation (each
project team is composed of four to five students), and an
academic term paper on LP related topics (the format of
the paper is strictly following the standards provided by
the university transactions). According to our experiences,
the papers composed by the undergraduates occasionally
bring interesting and fresh viewpoints toward the
manufacturing systems, and sometimes the service
industry. Some of these findings are worthy of digging,
and even developed to real academic papers published by
the university transactions. The course lays a rather heavy
burden on the senior and graduate students, when they
have huge pressure in job seeking and preparation with
graduate school entrance examinations. This contradictory
will be further discussed in the fourth section.
III. EFFECTS OF THE COURSE
The effects of the LP course could be displayed by
the group presentations and the academic term papers
composed by the individuals. For group presentations,
they reflect the team work of the small groups of students
during the entire semester. With the knowledge learned
from the course, the students are encouraged to extend the
LP methods to other application areas, and they could also
use this opportunity to make complements for the lessons
already given. For instance, some groups are engaged in
the drawbacks and limitations of the traditional LP
framework, which brings judgmental thinking to the class,
and poses questions as how to regard an existing theory in
a more objective way. Also during the presentation, each
group has to select one representative to demonstrate the
findings of the group in front of the class. This activity is
also counted in the final grades of the group, and the
person who gives the presentation is informed in advance
to imagine that the circumstance is an interview scene,
and the audiences are his/her HR officers. As it turns out,
we find that the students paid more attention in preparing
the slides, and the practice helps the students well into
his/her upcoming actual interviews.
For instance, in the year 2011, the senior students
who attend the course selected the presentation topics as
shown by the chart below.
Fig. 1. Presentation topic classification.
As Fig. 1 illustrates, half of the student groups
selected the presentation contents which are closely
related to the textbook chapters. And those groups
believed that the introduced parts were not discussed in
adequate detail during class. Some of the important issues
were simply omitted, therefore they asked the classmates
to pay more attention on such issues. Besides, another
portion of student groups worked on the lean production
related conceptions beyond the textbook, such as the lean
logistics, lean inventory management and so on. These
groups found new industrial fields where the very
meaning of lean could be applied. Furthermore, a small
amount of groups were concentrating on the relationship
between lean production and modern manufacturing
enterprises. The detailed subtopics are listed in the
following table.
TABLE I
Detailed subtopics selected by student groups
One-piece flow
Stream line design
One-minute die change
OJT training
Continuous Improvement
TPM
5S management
Group technology
Lean logistics
Bottleneck management
Lean inventory
Lean limitations
LP in Boeing
LP in Lenovo
Textbook
Related
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
New
Concepts
New
Applications
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
As mentioned in the Format subsection, Section Two,
there are two groups out of the overall fourteen groups,
who used video clips and animated movies to depict their
themes. And also, most group presentations have delicate
workspace photos and tables in their slides, which make
their performance stronger and more attractive. These
phenomena, as we observe, are by-products of the
multimedia teaching methods which have been employed
during the course.
Fig. 2. Term paper topic distribution.
Compared with the slides show, the academic term
paper is another highlight in the effects of this LP course.
The term papers are required to be accomplished by the
students themselves, thus the contents are far more
diverse than the presentation. In order to have parallel
comparisons, the senior students in the year 2011 are
again selected as research samples. Fig 2 shows the topic
distribution in the areas related to LP.
From Fig. 2, an interesting fact could be perceived,
the topic distribution of the term papers is largely denser
in the manufacturing application sector. Different from
the presentation proportion, this LP concepts used in real
manufacturing industry is surprisingly higher, while
during slides show, the 50% presentations are more about
a theory study rather than an application research. The
reason for this phenomenon is because during
presentation, the students have not gathered enough
materials for a real manufacturing business, such as the
onsite photographs, video clips and so on. And the
requirements of the presentation are that the groups
should introduce to the audiences something new, which
better has not been heard of before. Therefore, the
obvious discrepancy between the presentation and the
term paper emerges.
Noticeably, another amount of papers concentrate on
the LP conceptions used in the daily campus life, such as
the bathroom, the canteen, the post service and the
express delivery service around campus. These papers are
very interesting according to the general reader’s
perspective, and the lean production knowledge used in
these papers is not intensive, which is probably the cause
for the students to select these topics. Also observed from
Fig. 2, there are substantial amount of term papers are
focused on the ship industry, which is quite related to the
policy of the government, and the specialties within the
local region. As the central government calls to develop
the ocean related business, and at the same time, Zhejiang
has large quantity of ship manufacturing plants, therefore,
students mostly from native areas are much more familiar
and enthusiastic about the ship building and ocean based
logistics.
IV. DISCUSSION
Although the LP course has been imparted for several
years, there are still some problems existed and baffle the
teaching team, as we would like to perfect this set of
curriculums. And currently we are exploring our way into
the darkness. The following controversial topics are the
things we would like to improve, and incoming advices
and suggestions from our colleagues are warmly
welcomed.

As this course is quite popular in the local universities
and enterprises, still much an undertaking it is to extend
the course as a nation-wide prerequisite for both
undergraduates and graduates majored in industrial
engineering. According to the past experiences of the
authors, the manufacturing plants, service enterprises in
the local areas are thirsty to drink the wisdom of this LP
related knowledge. Meanwhile, the consulting firms
provided a price most businesses could not take.
Universities, on the other hand, could rise up and help the
smaller sized businesses to understand LP, and train more
industrial engineers with abundant knowledge of LP.
Therefore, the LP essence could be cultivated and
nurtured. As a famous Japanese industrial engineer has
said, the key of implementing the LP lies not on the
concepts or the techniques, but the culture it grows.

As discussed preliminarily in the second section, this
LP course is set in the first semester of senior year. But
during that time period, the students might have a lot of
pressure in job seeking and graduate school application.
The teaching team regards this course as a necessary
training for the future industrial engineering, so the
possibility of adjusting the semester of this course is
placed onto the table. And a possible alternative is to
switch the course to junior year, when the undergraduates
have completed their fundamental engineering training
courses and begun to learn the real manufacturing
processes.

The large discrepancy between the topics of the
presentations and the term papers is another deep concern.
As pointed out by the above paragraph, the learning
pressure during this course is observable, and it could be
reduced by moving the course to an earlier semester. On
the other hand, to synchronize the contents of slides show
and the term paper could also achieve this goal. For now,
as it is derived from Fig.1 and Fig.2, there are little
correlations between presentations and the term paper
topics, the students are spending their limited time in two
totally different tasks. A compromise could be figured out
by letting the students compose their term paper and
contribute to the group presentation at the same time.
Ergo, the time could be saved and the students are better
trained toward one unique aim, and it will cause the work
more intensive and delicate. Meanwhile, different term
papers from the students in the same group could help the
teaching team differentiate which part of the overall task
is accomplished by which student. Therefore, a more clear
scoring method could be obtained.
V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a description of the current ongoing LP
course has been introduced. And an outline of the
contents, the format and evaluation methods are discussed
in detail. From the teaching process, some distinguished
facts have been revealed via the statistics gathered from
the students’ slides show and term papers. Judged by the
local markets and the students, this course is one highly
regarded training program for the future industrial
engineers in China. And we would like to share some
discussions with our colleagues, both about its limitations
and possible improvements. Finally, after more and more
industrial engineers are trained by this course, a lean
culture is believed to be formed, and this culture is much
more important than making just one or two
manufacturing plants to earn more profits. This is the
reason why the teaching team leads this research and
drives this course to be a prerequisite for every industrial
engineering professional in China.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors are grateful for the financial support
partly from the NSFC Project (No.70971118), the NSF
Projects of Zhejiang province (Nos. LQ12G01008 and
LY12E05021), and the Scientific Research Startup
Foundation of Zhejiang University of Technology (No.
102010929).
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