Literature Review of Lean Manufacturing in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent an important component of the economy in both developed and developing countries. Nowadays, the competitive industrial environment is encouraging these companies to redesign their manufacturing practices. Lean manufacturing (LM) has been widely implemented in several industries and has been shown to have had a positive impact on the performance and development of companies. This review aims to examine this impact on the performance of manufacturing companies, to emphasize the recent progress of LM amongst SMEs worldwide, and to show that most successful LM initiatives are those implemented in SMEs and large companies. However, very small businesses (VSBs) are struggling to introduce LM into their management systems. A new approach has been developed to establish a new lean implementation framework that could be adapted to the specific context of VSBs.

Assessing Lean Adoption in Food Companies: The Case of Morocco

“…In the past years, many authors (McKone et al, 1999;Swink et al, 2005;Linderman et al, 2006;Shah and Ward, 2007) came up with a list of lean practices, which include the following: JIT, total quality management, total preventive maintenance, human resource management, pull, flow, low setup, controlled processes, productive maintenance, and involved employees. It is important to note the role that the lean approach can play in agri-food industries (Heymans, 2015;Boston Consulting Group, 2015), it can also be effective for all sizes of businesses, large and small including very small companies (Driouach et al, 2019). This part aims to present lean practices in the agroalimentary industry, which have been cited in the literature.…”

Covid-19 Impact on Moroccan Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Can Lean Practices Be an Effective Solution for Getting Out of Crisis?

“…This development became so successful that it is being used in manufacturing around the world. Numerous studies have dealt with the positive impacts of Lean on the industrial performance of companies [1,5,23,53,59,61]. There are many tangible benefits associated with Lean Manufacturing.…”

“…They are classified in three categories: operational, administrative and strategic [45]. Benefits in figure 1 have been observed in both Large Enterprises (LGs) and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) [5,19,23,45,61] as well as in many sectors of activity and even in the service sector [20]. The benefits generated by Lean are not limited to the improvement of operational, strategic and administrative performance as the success of a Lean system depends largely on the human dimension [22].…”

“…Lean manufacturing also makes it possible to offer better working conditions, reduce stress, stimulate team spirit, engage the company in continuous improvement processes, develop employee relations with management, and encourage teamwork based on effective productivity and rigor (Fig. 1) [23].…”

Robust Synthetic Control Charting

“…Lean production typically involves the use of quality tools such as control charts, flowcharts and fish bone diagrams, aiming to reduce or eliminate waste that occur during the production process. Today, the lean concept has been extended considerably into various fields beyond manufacturing (Driouach et al, 2019). As such, the use of quality tools, especially the control chart, is vital.…”