• assembly lines
• engineer-to-order
• lean manufacturing
• losses analysis
• performance measures

Traditionally, Lean manufacturing has been the focus of low-mix high-volume repetitive manufacturing industries. It must be noted that, in these industries, there are numerous researches illustrating success in the implementation of Lean manufacturing. In the last few years, in recognition of the success of the Lean manufacturing approach in the manufacturing sector, the amount of papers implementing Lean manufacturing outside the repetitive production environment, especially in Engineer-to-Order (ETO) manufacturing companies, has increased. However, while lean principles can be applied in any industry, in an ETO environment the implementation of methods and tools must be adapted. Only conceiving different new methods and tools it is possible to think to overcome one of the major constraints to unfold the full potential of Lean manufacturing in non-repetitive manufacturing environment.
The research activities presented in this Thesis are inserted in this context. With the aim of extending the toolbox available to all practitioners in the ETO manufacturing companies, the research activity carried out focused on the development and implementation of Lean manufacturing tools and methods for the manufacturing efficiency in ETO production environments.
This Thesis is concretized as follows. The first five chapters present research activities directly ascribable to ETO production environment. After exploiting the peculiarities of Manufacturing cost deployment (MCD), which is the fundamental pillar of World Class Manufacturing (WCM), the evaluation model has been extended to the ‘world’ of risk analysis and reliability, as well as to that of energy diagnosis in the process industry. Finally, other two chapters report additional research activities outstanding the Lean-ETO context.
Still the interest in implementing Lean in non-repetitive manufacturing environment is growing, future work may be thus devoted to further extending the research here presented.