Sustainable Lean Implementation: An Assessment Tool

Abstract

The lean management philosophy is applied to improve the productivity and customer satisfaction of an organization. Besides the manufacturing sector, where it has been a standard for a long time, it was adopted by other sectors like service, administration, and research. Though lean implementations often fail or are not sustainable. Failure reasons and success factors are named based on literature reviews. Furthermore, business models and awarding prizes for lean approaches are described and analyzed. Based on this, an assessment tool is developed. It consists of 24 criteria that are divided in the 4 categories: leadership, culture, knowledge, and process. The category culture is subdivided in: improvement, empowering, and partnering. The rating of each criterion works by interviews on the management and supervisor level, and surveys on all levels of the company. To get an objective third-party feedback, external experts can be consulted. The highest possible score is 10 and the lowest possible 1. To improve the score of low rated criteria, different countermeasures for each criterion are named. By gathering the knowledge of different research and case studies, this tool can help companies to implement lean in a sustainable way. Still it has to be considered, that every lean approach is individual and the proposed countermeasures have to be used properly. This tool is not verified in practice yet and needs of further research are mentioned as well.

The Indirect Effect of Customer Relations on Lean Social Factors and Organizational Readiness for Change Amongst Manufacturing Smes in Nigeria: PLS-Sem Approach

“…Moreover, Lean manufacturing strategies have been mainly conceived to be deployed in large organizations, which made SMEs deal with such a type of project as a risky decision that must be well prepared for change before deployment (Maware et al, 2021;Moya, Galvez, Muller, Camargo, & Moya, 2019). Further, Lean manufacturing still has its problems, as apparent in the rate of failed implementations Schröders and Cruz-Machado (2015), which is mainly associated with a lack of assessment of organizational readiness for change (Shea, Jacobs, Broad literature emphasizes the importance of organizational readiness for change and its approach to are ever-growing need, though very little evidence has been offered to promote change management strategies within SMEs (Budhiraja, 2019). Research on change management concentrates typically on large-scale enterprises, i.e., high-tech and multinational firms, due to easy accessibility to data regarding processes and could easily clarify the peculiarities (Ceptureanu, 2015).…”

Lean implementation barriers in the apparel industry in Bangladesh

“…The study conducted in 187 Thai manufacturing firms reveals that LM implementation has improved operational performance, such as productivity improvements, cost reduction and customer satisfaction (Rahman et al , 2010). 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).…”