The Malaysian Productivity Blueprint was a strategy under the 11MP to boost productivity and propel economic growth. The Blueprint set out the following five initiatives identified for the Chemicals Industry:

i. Establishment of a Chemicals Centre of Excellence
ii. Enable SMEs to move towards high value add components in the chemical value chain
iii. Provide technical, digital and management support to enhance SME capability
iv. Deepen collaboration between industry players and educational institutions
v. Provide support to high potential SMEs to expand internationally

MPMA has been tasked to chair initiative ii and co-chair initiative iv on the plastics cluster.

On Initiative ii, one of the projects under IWG2 for 2018 is the Lean Management Transformation System Development Programme for SMEs and mid-tier companies from the plastics, oleochemical and pharmaceutical industries. Only five companies were selected to undertake this Programme.

Lean management is a wholistic approach to assist companies achieve their optimum capacity in their organisation with the resources they employed, be it on manufacturing processes, technology adoption, procurement, administration support, etc, to enable the organisation to stay on the cutting edge in the market/niche that they compete in. Lean focuses on identifying areas of ‘waste’ in the organisation and established ways to eliminate or eradicate that ‘waste’ to quantify in monetary value in terms of cost savings or in qualitative measures.

Waste is anything that adds cost or time without adding value – overproduction, waiting, transporting, inappropriate processing, unnecessary inventory , unnecessary/excess motion and defects.