NationaliTeas is a tea factory that employs a lean manufacturing philosophy to improve its market share and competitiveness. Tea processing commences when the tender leaves, including the three eaves and bud, are plucked from the farm. This stage is crucial because the integrity of the shoot should be maintained to produce a high-quality product at later phases. According to Dethlefsen & Balk (2022), the process is labor-intensive, and it requires huge amounts of money to carry out efficiently. Therefore, the factory management considers skipping some of the steps to offset operating costs, but they ensure that the final product is appealing. They also eliminate all waste in processes and focus on those processes that add value to the final product. The first step that the management of NationaliTeas needs to eliminate is picking up usable tea leaves from the field workers. Today the factory should reduce human laborers and replace them with automated tea-plucking machines. The automation will result in the timely delivery of tea for processing, reducing unnecessary human errors (Dethlefsen & Balk, 2022). As a result, processing hastens, and it ensures that the final product is always ready for delivery to the market to maximize the factory’s return on investment.
Furthermore, NationaliTeas Tea Factory should also eliminate manual weighing, where human labor is used to transport weighed bags to the processing plant. As a result, there will be a continuous flow of tea from the first lifting point to the processing zone, which will, in turn, improve the handling capacity, and at the same time utilize minimal resources. The third step to improve efficiency is to eliminate manual visual inspection and sorting (Dethlefsen & Balk, 2022). Instead, this step should be completed when the material is reweighed after leaving the rolling tray.
Additionally, second drying and oxidation should be eliminated to achieve a standardized work. It would be efficient and fast to complete this process while performing the first oxidation to ensure the safety of the final product. To improve environmental sustainability, processes such as throwing poor quality tea should cease, and instead find a market that can consume this low-quality tea at relatively lower prices. Furthermore, carriers made of natural fibers such as cotton and paper sacs should replace plastic bags during tealeaves packaging. Process automation increases productivity, apart from ensuring efficient use of materials (Dethlefsen & Balk, 2022). Additionally, it leads to better product quality and reduced factory lead times. However, it leads to worker displacement, increasing unemployment rates.
Triple bottom line theory suggests that companies should safeguard three factors, including profit, people, and the planet. Thus, process automation is key to maximizing its profits while increasing work efficiency for the staff employed (Dethlefsen & Balk, 2022). The team and the company should also tailor their handling procedures to ensure sustainable environmental management practices in their modes of production, packaging, and distribution of tea to various markets. On this note, NationaliTeas will increase benefits from modern operations and management techniques. The latter can help the company to analyze customer needs and expectations and develop frameworks that can meet them promptly. Additionally, the factory will be able to identify the waste in processes and ensure that all steps are value-added to safeguard the environment. The main goal of lean manufacturing is doing more with less while ensuring that competitive cost and efficient service is provided to the customer.
Reference
Dethlefsen, & Balk. (2022). Harvest / Processing: Producing black tea.