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Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Lean Manufacturing

Value-added

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

adjectiveCommon term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, value-added means: Describing an activity that changes a product in a way the customer is willing to pay for, such as machining, assembling or painting it.

In Turkish: katma değerli, değer katan

How it is used

Used in lean analysis to sort activities into value-added, non-value-added (pure waste) and necessary non-value-added (such as legally required checks). Teams calculate value-added time as a share of total lead time, which is often only a few percent.

Example sentences

  1. Only 6 minutes of the 4-hour process are value-added; the rest is moving and waiting.

  2. Inspection is not a value-added step, but the customer requires it for now.

Common collocations

  • value-added time
  • value-added activity
  • non-value-added
  • value-added ratio
  • wasteIn lean thinking, any activity that uses time or resources but adds no value for the customer, such as waiting, extra movement or making too much.
  • value stream mappingA lean method of drawing all the steps, material flows and information flows needed to make a product, to see where time is lost and plan improvements. Often shortened to VSM.
  • lean manufacturingA way of running production that aims to deliver what the customer needs with the least waste of time, material and effort, based on the Toyota Production System.
  • lead timeThe total time between the start of a process, such as receiving an order, and its end, such as delivering the product to the customer.

More terms: Lean Manufacturing

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