In the new era of the global market, Small and Medium Industry (SMI) have to embark in business strategy such as lean manufacturing implementation in order to survive and stay longer in the market. Thus, the purpose of this study is to explore to what extent the lean manufacturing has been adopted by SMIs in West Coast Sabah. Questionnaires survey with Likert scale was used to explore the extent of lean manufacturing implementation. Samples from this study were taken from SMIs that registered with Ministry of Industrial Development (MID) Sabah and focused on West Coast Sabah. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 18.0) was used to analyze the data and perform some statistical analysis of frequency percentage and mean. Through these findings, the result revealed that small percentage of the companies has implemented lean manufacturing. The remaining high percentage of the companies believed not yet taken lean initiatives. It is found that the main motivation which influenced them to implement lean manufacturing is productivity. The level of lean tools implementation by SMIs showed that a fairly high percentage on the basic lean tools adoption happened in many organizations. Findings from this study also showed that barriers such as the effort required to change mindset, longer time and more effort required for lean implementation, attitude of shop floor employees and lack of lean awareness, are the obstacles that delaying the lean manufacturing implementation on SMIs in West Coast Sabah.

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Lean Manufacturing (LM) is a production practice to eliminate waste by considering the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the customer to be wasteful. For achieving lean production, typical lean principles are already established as a set of LM tools, such as Single minute exchange of die (SMED), Kanban, total productive maintenance, etc, and some of these tools are also available as computer software. Even though these tools could resolve many manufacturing issues, expected results by LM tools cannot be seen before their implementation. This study focuses on a process simulation approach to see the effectiveness of LM tools before their implementation. This study designed a process model of a coolant hose manufacturing (CHM) factory and implemented its simulation model. This paper presents the implemented simulation model and shows how it could be used to see the effect of LM tools using an example of SMED LM tool.

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In this paper, we studied a new method for robot programming: view-based teaching/playback. It can achieve more robustness against changes of task conditions, such as initial positions of the object, than conventional teaching/playback. We devised an algorithm to switch images used for the view-based teaching/playback adaptively between full-images and sub-images. In application to pushing tasks by an industrial manipulator, view-based teaching/playback with the algorithm succeeded even in the case of occlusion.

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In this study, to support bedridden people such as elder people or paretic, a life support system using mobile robots has been developed. This system consists with mobile robots and interfaces, which supply information to a user and receive requests from the user, a server, which provides information to each interfaces and send robots commands that are converted from requests interfaces got. In this paper, using such compositions, communication between users and people at a distance is achieved. Because of age or paralysis, users seem to be awkward. Thus, most accepted communication style which requires input words and sentences such as e-mail, SNS, internet chat and so on, is not better for them. Hence, by the proposed system converts words and sentences to voice or sounds, users can use such a communication service.

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The paper describes sheet metal forming techniques in shipbuilding, especially that new approach by utilizing a cold bending process, i.e., a press process, to form a wide and thick steel plate into the arbitrary objective shape. The state-of-the-art technology in this research is that a press machine which is used for general purpose in most shipyards is directly utilized to form the undevelopable shape, not preparing the special die for each plate. The paper introduces the general about the sheet metal forming work in shipbuilding at first. Then the press supporting system which is already developed and introduced in the actual shipyard is explained. The further development for extending its function to form an undevelopable surface by the press work is described finally.

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