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The research described in this article has set out to determine the extent to which lean thinking is being adopted as a manufacturing philosophy by process industries. It concerns the application and examination of key lean manufacturing principles, namely, the alignment of production with demand, the elimination of waste, the integration of suppli...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... four principles and some of their contributory lean practices are depicted in Figure 1. The principles are distinct yet mutually supportive ideas. ...
Context 2
... hierarchical nature of the lean framework represented by Figure 1 conveys the notion of policy deployment and the need for organisational goals to be in concert with lean principles and practices. This notion of devolving strategic intent throughout an enterprise and decision-making responsibility to the workforce is then reflected in principle 4 (the creative involvement of the workforce in process improvement activities). ...
Context 3
... questions con- cerned run times, numbers of work centres, inventory points, formulation complexity, routings, product variety, equipment flexibility, lead-times and the range of raw material ingredients. The final section concerned a lean audit based on the lean principles and practices depicted in Figure 1. The content of the lean audit consisted of a series of statements that respon- dents were asked the extent to which they agreed with in relation to a particular product stream using a six- point Likert scale ranging from 'strongly disagree' to 'strongly agree'. ...
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In the last decade, industry across the globe has been under a massive change in its manufacturing paradigm triggered by the emergence of concepts such as Industry 4.0. Established streamlining philosophies such as Lean manufacturing had to cope with this paradigm shift. In this regard, expansive literature has developed concepts such as Digital Le...
Lean manufacturing is a conceptual framework based on a few established principles and techniques and a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement by flowing the product. The implementation of Lean Manufacturing starts with the development of Value Stream Maps. A value stream mapping is a pencil and pape...
This paper presents a look at the concept of Lean Manufacturing as applied to the office environment. Lean Manufac-turing, which is often referred to as Lean, is a philosophy of manufacturing process improvement through the elimina-tion of waste. As Lean developed since its origins in the automobile industry, it has been extended to apply to variou...
Citations
... However, some recent research indicates that many businesses have adopted a lean manufacturing system (LMS) with varying degrees of success in terms of enhancing organizational performance and gaining competitive advantages (Doolen and Hacker, 2005;Schröders and Cruz-Machado, 2015). Besides, the majority of earlier literature on LM concentrated on businesses in developed countries such as North America or Europe but gave less attention to emerging economies such as Bangladesh and India (Bashar and Hasin, 2018;Lyons et al., 2013;Jasti and Kodali, 2015). A study on ready-made garments (RMG) manufacturing firms in Bangladesh reveals that 32% of the managers working in the apparel firms are not even familiar with the concept of LM (Bashar and Hasin, 2018). ...
Purpose
In the highly competitive business landscape, manufacturing firms need to adopt an effective manufacturing strategy to attain a successful world-class manufacturing status. Over the past few decades, the lean manufacturing (LM) approach has gained recognition as one of the foremost strategies for enhancing performance. However, the implementation of LM poses significant challenges due to several barriers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the primary barriers to lean implementation within the apparel industry.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper used an exploratory study approach, using a three-part structured questionnaire to assess the level of agreement on different lean barriers. The measurement of these barriers was conducted using a five-point Likert scale. Empirical data were collected from 177 apparel companies located in Bangladesh.
Findings
The findings of the research highlight that the primary obstacles to implementing LI include a lack of understanding of the lean manufacturing system (LMS), the manufacturing process, the company culture and resistance from employees.
Research limitations/implications
This paper could potentially limit the generalizability of this research, as it exclusively examines a single manufacturing sector – the apparel industry.
Practical implications
This paper will help practitioners in finding solutions to resolve discrepancies between current manufacturing practices and the LMS.
Originality/value
This paper fulfills an identified need to examine the extent of lean adoption within the apparel industry of Bangladesh.
... • Inadequate customer service delivery Until these supply chain challenges are curtailed, businesses in sub-Saharan Africa especially, the local businesses will remain far from their customers and continue to creep. [15] held that a customer led supply chain is one focused on removing waste, engineering production and demand synchronization, supplier alignment and ingenious participation of labour force in supply chain process improvement actions. The essence of this paper is to gather experts' view on how companies in Africa can build a supply chain that is customer-focused given that a lot of these businesses are large employers in Africa and reels for economic growth and therefore need these customers for continuing economic growth and development in Africa. ...
This study sought experts' opinions on the possible transformation strategies businesses in Africa can undergo to build a customer-oriented supply chain that competes favourably in this fast-paced, globalised business environment. The Delphi Technique approach was adopted to achieve this, involving 20 practitioners whose role spans logistics and supply chain-related operations. Findings were supported with case examples from world-class supply chains to aid insights about trends. Nine (9) areas to lead the supply chain transformation were identified. It is expected that medium to large companies in Africa consider evolving their supply chains along these lines as their business strategies evolve. Supply chain evolvement, which does not reflect the company's changing business strategy, may not be worth it. Customer-focused companies are meeting customer needs for innovation within a progressively "nanosecond" response, little delivery volume and a shorter life-cycle. Responsiveness, resilience, reliability and realignment are critical drivers of competitive advantage.
... 2. Lean production and lean production theory Lean manufacturing consists of five main principles (Bajjou and Chafi, 2020;Gento et al., 2020;Womack and Jones, 1997), as presented in Figure 1. The term "lean" refers to a set of MRR tools or techniques designed to increase business competitiveness by eliminating waste from all processes (Lyons et al., 2013;Marin-Garcia and Bonavia, 2015;Shah and Ward, 2007). In the process improvement context, LP refers to a set of techniques focused on continuous process improvement by targeting to remove all non-value-added activities and reduce waste in an organization (Ruiz-Benítez et al., 2018;Tiwari et al., 2020). ...
Purpose
A paradigm shift of industry revolution 4.0 is made possible by technological advances that constitute a reversal of conventional lean production (LP) processes. In addition, there is increasing pressure on the manufacturing industry to manage operations responsibly towards the environmental and social impact, on top of the economic. These have motivated the manufacturing industry to identify approaches to implementing LP to achieve sustainable organizational performance. Hence, this study aims to examine the moderating role of industry 4.0 technologies adoption in the relationship between LP and sustainable organizational performance.
Design/methodology/approach
This study proposed a research framework on the relationship between LP and sustainable organizational performance supported by LP theory and triple bottom line theory, with industry 4.0 technologies adoption as a moderator. A quantitative survey method was used in this study for data collection. The respondents in this study were middle or top management in manufacturing companies, including directors, managers, supervisors and coordinators. To investigate the demographic variables of respondents, descriptive statistics were generated by using IBM Statistical Packages for the Social Sciences. For measurement and structural model evaluations, partial least square structural equation modelling was used.
Findings
Based on the proposed research framework in this study, supplier feedback, just-in-time delivery, supplier development, customer involvement, pull system, continuous flow, set-up time reduction (STR), statistical process control, total productive maintenance (TPM) and employee involvement are the dimensions for LP. This study revealed that industry 4.0 technologies adoption positively moderated the relationships of five LP dimensions towards a sustainable organizational performance, namely, supplier feedback, supplier development, continuous flow, STR and TPM.
Originality/value
This study provided insights that would enable practitioners to better strategize the co-existence of LP and industry 4.0 technologies adoption in mutually supporting sustainable organizational performance (environmental, social and economic).
... The results reveal that SD organizations adopt Leagile approach to improve their performance. Like manufacturing, SD organizations also adopt all core five lean principles, i.e. value, value stream, flow, pull and perfection (Womack and Jones, 1996;Shah and Ward, 2007;Lyons et al., 2011;Yadav et al., 2019a). After the fruitful adoption of lean principles across different industrial sectors, this study has also supported the claim that lean is a universal system (Billesbach, 1994;Womack and Jones, 1996) by exploring it in a new sector. ...
Purpose
In software development (SD), practitioners have realized the importance of lean thinking. A new term “Leagile” is coined, which is an integrated approach of traditional lean and agile thinking to managing the operations. The study aims to investigate the application of the Leagile principles in a new sector and establish a relationship between the adoption of Leagile approach and operational performance (OP) in SD organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Empirical research is conducted to investigate the linkage between the Leagile principles and operational measures. Data is collected through surveys from 256 SD industries located in 11 states of India and analysed using the structural equation modelling approach.
Findings
The practitioners envisage a positive impact of adoption of Leagile principles on OP of SD organizations, but one of the principles, i.e. perfection, is unable to influence the performance.
Originality/value
The study contributes by authorizing the contribution of Leagile principles towards OP of SD organizations. The outcomes will motivate the practitioners to enhance the adoption of Leagile principles in SD organizations.
... The process industry has been relatively under-researched in the field of lean research, which is primarily because of the specific prevailing circumstances. Still, many lean principles and practices can be effectively implemented in this industry (Abdulmalek et al., 2006;King, 2009;Lyons et al., 2013). The improvement program that has been studied has been conceptualized by our case company and tailored to the needs of its specific industrial context. ...
Purpose
Do managers at different hierarchical levels in a firm perceive the effectiveness of a lean program differently, and does it matter for their commitment to it and the resulting lean implementation? This study answers these questions by analyzing the perceptions and behaviors of top and middle managers in a manufacturer deploying a global lean program.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors hypothesize that managers at different levels perceive lean programs differently, which, in turn, should affect their commitment to lean and the resulting implementation. To test these relationships empirically, the authors collect survey data from a global manufacturer in the process industry and analyze them using hierarchical linear regression and structural equation modeling.
Findings
The findings show that middle managers perceive lean programs as more effective than top managers do. They further show that higher commitment from the top and middle managers to the lean program is positively related to building the organizational infrastructure needed for lean implementation.
Research limitations/implications
This research is conducted in one global company. Although the research setting implicitly controls for many possible confounding variables, such as the product and process complexity or organizational culture, future research can explore and test the findings in other organizational contexts.
Originality/value
This study is the first to empirically study the relations between perceptions of and commitment to lean programs across different hierarchical levels and what it means for program implementation. The paper contributes new plausible explanations for why many lean programs slow down.
... Thus, at the beginning of the 90's, the new production philosophy was already known in other latitudes, in different ways, among them "lossless production", "new production system" or "world-class manufacturing", and it was implemented in other fields such as administration and product development ( Koskela, 1992). Therefore, during the 1990s, the Lean concept gradually spread from an operational level to a more strategic level in organizations (Lyons et al., 2013). In other words, the methodology started at the operational levels, passing through the executive levels and reaching the strategic levels. ...
The construction industry is an important part of the economic sector of a country, therefore, it is important to verify the new management systems that are implemented in the main construction industries of the world. This article makes a bibliographic review of the Lean Construction (LC) philosophy, introduced by Professor Lauri Koskela in 1992, based on the model used by the automobile industry in the 1980s, called “Lean production”. The theoretical bases of LC intend to see production in construction as a process of transformation, flow and value generator, consequently, the objective of Lean Construction is to create good production systems that allow optimizing, reducing, or eliminating flows to improve delivery times. Within the framework of creating Lean tools to improve the management of construction projects, the Last Planner System arises to improve the work scheduling process and the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) model, which by unifying it with LC becomes the Lean Project Delivery System (LPDS) project execution system, which proposes the methodology to develop construction projects under five phases and 12 “Lean” stages, in which the development of tools that contribute to the generation of value. Finally, the 3D Building Information Modeling (BIM) modeling technology, although not part of LC, is an important help tool for the LPDS model, helping to better understand the construction processes of complex designs to save time in their construction. Under this paradigm, the emergence of new tools gives us a better vision of the future of Lean Construction.
... More specifically, Cluster 1 includes papers that have mainly studied the basic concepts of LSCM through an examination of the state-of-the-art, focusing on its divergences in the literature (Bhamu & Singh Sangwan, 2014), lean foundations (Moyano-Fuentes & Sacristán-Díaz, 2012; Samuel et al., 2015), lean manufacturing (Panwar et al., 2015), and the concept of 'waste' (Thürer et al., 2017). Some authors have studied the adoption of lean thinking focusing on different contexts such as process industry (Lyons et al., 2013), small and medium enterprises (Alkhoraif et al., 2019;Hu et al., 2015;Zhou, 2016), and supply networks (Bortolotti et al., 2016). Cluster 2 presents a group of papers on LSCM implementation and performance. ...
... Some papers have focused on the integration of LSCM and green practices (Bhattacharya et al., 2019; Hallam & Contreras, 2016; Sant'Anna et al., 2017), while others have reviewed the literature on the links and interrelationships between LSCM and sustainability (Caldera et al., 2017; Garza-Reyes, 2015; Martínez León & Calvo-Amodio, 2017; Martínez-Jurado & Moyano-Fuentes, 2014). The impact of lean and green supply chain management on performance has also been evaluated (Baliga et al., 2019; Huo et al., 2019; Inman & Green, 2018).Table 7. Lead papers of each cluster in LSCM Cluster ReferenceCluster 1(Alkhoraif et al., 2019),(Bhamu & Singh Sangwan, 2014),(Bortolotti et al., 2016),(Hu et al., 2015),(Lyons et al., 2013), (Moyano-Fuentes & Sacristán-Díaz, 2012), ...
Lean Supply Chain Management is an emerging research field in Operations Management that is attracting growing attention from researchers and practitioners. This paper aims to present a comprehensive analysis of the Lean Supply Chain Management literature to understand the influence, basic research characteristics, interrelationships, and productivity of the research in this field. The present study uses BibExcel and VOSviewer software to conduct thorough bibliometric and network analyses of 715 papers published in the Web of Science database over the period 1996-2020. The use of bibliometric methods has enabled the identification of current and emerging research clusters to detect some key research topics, interrelations, and collaboration patterns. Moreover, this analysis has enabled to draw numerous conclusions and propose a roadmap for future research in the field. This paper, therefore, provides some new insights not previously evaluated in other reviews of Lean Supply Chain Management that can help researchers to understand the evolution of research trends through a proposed classification of the literature on this topic.
... Moreover, pharmaceutical products are often subject to large market volatility and unpredictability (consider, for example, Tamiflu or COVID-19 vaccines). These important characteristics assumedly affect the way hard lean practices can be employed and how they affect firm performance (Lyons et al., 2013). Nevertheless, pharmaceutical companies are seeking to implement lean like other industries (Friedli et al., 2013). ...
... To control for company site size, we followed common classification in operations management research and distinguished between large sites on the one hand (≥500 employees) and small or mediumsized sites on the other hand (<500 employees) (e.g. Lyons et al., 2013;Tortorella et al., 2019; The role of management Youn et al., 2012). To allow generalisation across distinct pharmaceutical site types, we further considered the site classifiers brand manufacturers, generics manufacturers and contract manufacturers as control variables [1]. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate how soft lean practices moderate the performance effects of hard lean practices. The authors provide new evidence from the pharmaceutical industry, which is characterized by a highly regulated and technical environment and has been largely uncharted in the lean literature.
Design/methodology/approach
Based on a review of the literature, the authors define a set of soft and hard lean practices. The authors test the hypotheses using factor analysis and moderated hierarchical linear regression on a unique dataset containing survey data and real performance measures of 351 pharmaceutical plants.
Findings
The results show that soft lean practices can be both enabling and constraining. When management engages in performance measurement, visualisation and employee empowerment the relationship between hard lean practices and performance is positively moderated. On the other hand, when managers emphasise goal setting and work standardisation the performance outcomes are reduced.
Practical implications
Effective lean managers build organisational commitment by motivating other employees to implement lean. They use performance measurement, visualisation and employee empowerment to focus on the “why”. Less effective managers engage in commanding and micro-management. Such managers focus on the “what” by using practices like goal setting and work standardisation.
Originality/value
This article contributes to the literature on lean management by empirically testing the moderator-variable interaction effects between soft and hard lean practices. In addition, it adds new evidence from the important pharmaceutical industry.
... Lean management (LM) has been adopted by many firms in different sectors in recent decades with the expectation of improving their competitiveness (Moyano-Fuentes and Sacrist an-D ıaz 2012; Lyons et al. 2013;Abreu-Led on et al. 2018;Schonberger 2020;Nielsen, Kristensen, and Grasso 2021). The extension of LM to all the processes in the focal firm and across suppliers and customers to eliminate waste and inefficiencies is known as Lean Supply Chain Management (LSCM) (Lamming 1996;Womack and Jones 1996;Swenseth and Olson 2016). ...
The purpose of this paper is to propose a performance measurement framework to evaluate Lean Supply Chain Management (LSCM) performance. A literature review was performed to identify the main goals and performance indicators in LSCM. A questionnaire was designed that included the identified goals and measures. Next, based on data collected from international academics and practitioners with expertise in LSCM, a two-stage Delphi study using Fuzzy Delphi and Fuzzy DEMATEL methods was carried out to refine the most relevant goals and metrics and their interrelationships and establish benchmark values that are useful for managers to evaluate the performance achieved through the deployment of lean principles, practices, and techniques throughout the supply chain. Finally, an integrated performance measurement framework based on the balanced scorecard approach is proposed with a discussion of the academic and practical implications of the proposed framework.
... There is also research evidence on the benefits of lean in the area of cost reduction through eliminating seven types of waste namely transportation, waiting time, inventory, overproduction, motion, over-processing and defects (Filho et al., 2016;Kolawole et al., 2021). But then, scholars have noted that very few companies have recorded success with implementing lean (Lyons et al., 2013) for some reasons such as wrong tools applied to sectors that do not require such, leading to failure. On the other hand, the Six Sigma technique does not only reduce variation but has assisted industries to improve efficiencies and customer satisfaction (Sin et al., 2015). ...
Purpose
The topic of Lean Six Sigma (LSS) implementation in a supply chain context is an emerging research stream comprising of diverse objectives and complex processes thereby presenting opportunities for further exploration and organizational process improvement. Thus, this study proposes an integrated multi-criteria decision-making methodology to determine what can facilitate the successful implementation of LSS as an organizational change strategy in the manufacturing supply chain.
Design/methodology/approach
The proposed methodology based on Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory and hierarchical Evaluation Based on Distance to Average Solution is employed to ascertain the relative importance and priorities of an identified framework of factors with the aid of opinions of managers in the Nigerian plastics industry.
Findings
The results show a high significance of institution-based factors (e.g. government regulations) and present relevant implications to the policymakers as well as the managers and practitioners of the plastics manufacturing industry.
Originality/value
This study indicates a possible pathway to accurately evaluate a framework of critical factors to integrate and institutionalize LSS in the manufacturing supply chain for organizational performance improvement.
