Application and success of the lean manufacturing in Thailand, case study: Electrolux Professional Rayong

Application and success of lean manufacturing in Thailand, case study: Electrolux Professional 3 SUMMARY This paper concerns the working experience of a graduating student of management engineering in a foreign country, particularly in Thailand. Thailand is a very different country from all the European States as it will be described by the following chapters of the thesis, with several examples of true working life. Our approach to work, as opinion of the writer, but broadly shared among western countries’ people that work or had worked in Thailand, is one of the most different aspect between our cultures. This great difference originate from the education system, both in the schools and in the families context, and from their religion, that is Buddhist. We will see many examples that justify this argumentation, being aware that the target of the written is not to judge which of the two approach is better, but it is to give to the reader the overview of the Thai working environment, in order to take a better decision concerned the engagement in a new business in this country. Moreover, the scope of the writer is to fulfil the lack of the literature about the application of some management techniques, developed from the famous approach of the Lean Thinking and Kaizen culture, in the APAC zone, particularly in Thailand. It will be interesting to discover the problems found about the establishment of a Kaizen culture and a Lean manufacturing system, although these two management techniques were born in the TPS (Toyota Production System), the famous and widely emulated management system of the Japanese automotive factory. The expectation about the instauration of the Lean Manufacturing and Kaizen approach in a Thai production system could be that it would be easy to set them and to educate the people to them, because Thailand is part of the same economic zone called APAC as Japan, reason why Thailand should have a similar culture to the Japanese one. We will discover that the features of the Thai workers are quite different from the ideal kaizen factory’s employees, but with a strong standardization of processes and some psychological approaches or “tricks”, the tuning of this management system could be a great success. The thesis research is a proposal of the professor of the University of Studies of Udine Pietro Romano and the factory manager of Electrolux Professional Thailand Andrea Bet. They concur together to give the great opportunity to the students of Udine’s University to live 9-12 months in this wonderful environment, which both for private and for working context has an unique charm to discover.