YesGlobal manufacturing industry mostly depends on new product development and processes to
become competitive. The product development process for automotive industry is normally
complicated, lengthy, expensive, and risky. Hence, a study of lean manufacturing processes for
low volume manufacturing in automotive industry is proposed to overcome this issue by
eliminating all wastes in the lengthy process. This paper presents a conceptual design approach to
the development of a hybrid Knowledge Based (KB) system for lean process in Low Volume
Automotive Manufacturing (LVAM). The research concentrates on the low volume processes by
using a hybrid KB system, which is a blend of KB system and Gauging Absences of Pre-requisites
(GAP). The hybrid KB/GAP system identifies all potential waste elements of low volume process
manufacturing. The KB system analyses the difference between the existing and the benchmark
standards for lean process for an effective implementation through the GAP analysis technique.
The proposed model explores three major lean process components, namely Employee
Involvement, Waste Elimination, and Kaizen (continuous improvement). These three components
provide valuable information in order for decision makers to design and implement an optimised
low volume manufacturing process, but which can be applied in all process manufacturing,
including chemical processing
