Lean Production Principles in Remanufacturing A Case Study at a Toner Cartridge Remanufacturer

Scandi-Toner AB works with remanufacturing of toner cartridges; both color cartridges and black cartridges The company Scandi-Toner and the remanufacturing industry in general do, compared to ordinary manufacturing, have some specific characteristics that might limit the possibilities to apply lean production principles, due to the high degree of uncertainty in the production process. These uncertainties are mainly caused by two factors: the quantity and quality of returned cores. Overall, these characteristics make the remanufacturing material flow harder to control. Hence the purpose of this paper is to analyze if lean productions principles for material flow can be applied in a remanufacturing environment, and especially at the Swedish remanufacturer Scandi-Toner AB. The analysis shows that lean production principles can be applied in remanufacturing environments, with some constraints. For the case company the study showed that for example the workshop layout could be improved significantly according to lean production principles. The one major conclusion that can be drawn from this analysis are that the inherent characteristics of variable processing times and uncertainty in materials recovered have the major negative impact for implementing a lean production process. Vice versa, given an accurate supply of parts for reassembly, all the appropriate principles of a lean production material flow can be implemented in the phases of reassembly and testing.