Lean Manufacturing (LM) is one of the systematic approach to achieve productivity improvement for organizations. LM focuses on the wastes elimination and non-value added activities from the production. Although many enterprises succeeded in applying LM around the world, there are only less than 20 per cent of them have achieved and maintained LM activities for the time. The aim of this research is to present the critical factors constituting the successful implementation of LM in Vietnamese manufacturing enterprises. There are nine are classified as the critical for the successful adoption of LM in Vietnamese enterprises.

Kaizen has long been known as an improvement philosophy that starts with small frequent changes to make larger changes in production. These changes come from the ideas and creative thinking of employees to ensure that the production conditions and processes are continuously improved. However, Kaizen not only helps motivate employees to think creatively with effective methods and skills, but it also helps them develop their capabilities, personality, and good work habits. The purpose of this paper is to show a new approach to human resources quality improvement through the Kaizen philosophy as a sustainable and active strategy to improve work performance. With analytical research on the relationship between Kaizen implementation, human resources quality improvement, and production efficiency and exploratory research on particular cases in manufacturing enterprises in Vietnam, the authors point out changes in production efficiency and human capacity before and after implementing improvement (Kaizen) projects. The paper finds significant changes of employee capability (Kaizen practitioners) after evaluating the human resource development process on the basis of six indicators of two groups (namely capacity development, personality development) and a set of criteria using a 5-point scale. In addition, the paper proposes a PDCA based framework with 12 contents corresponding to stages of the human resource development. This paper extends theories related to Lean Manufacturing or Kaizen, highlighting how philosophy of Kaizen has hard and soft impacts on the improvement of performance and human resources.

Lean is one of the systematic approach to achieve higher value for organizations through eliminate non-value-added activities. It is an integrated set of tools, techniques, and principles designed to optimize cost, quality and delivery while improving safety. In Vietnam, industry waste management and treatment has become serious issue. The aim of this research is to present the effective of Lean application for industrial wastes collecting and delivery improvement. Through a case study, this paper showed the way of Lean tools and principles applied for wastes management and treatment such as Value Stream Mapping, Pull system, Visual Control, and Andon.... to get benefit on both economic and environment. In addition, the results introduced a good experience for Vietnamese enterprises in cost saving and sustainable development in waste management.

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