Lean manufacturing was developed by Toyota Motor Company to address their concrete needs in a restricted market in times of economic trouble. These concepts have been studied and proven to be transferrable and applicable to a wide variety of industries (Duque and Cadavid, 2007). Any organization whether manufacturing or service-oriented may ultimately depend on its competency to systematically and continuously respond to these vicissitudes for enhancing the product value (Sundar et al., 2014).
Lean manufacturing or lean production has been one of the most popular paradigms in waste elimination in the manufacturing and service industry. Many firms favor lean manufacturing in order to enhance quality and productivity (Wahab et al., 2013). Lean manufacturing is gaining popularity as an approach that can achieve consequential performance improvement in the industry. However, the application of lean manufacturing is not a facile process. To reach the stage of full implementation of lean manufacturing will take a long time and during that time continuous improvement must be made (Susilawati et al., 2015). The ‘lean’ approach has been applied more frequently in discrete manufacturing than in the continuous/process sector, mainly because of several perceived barriers in the latter environment that have caused managers to be reluctant to make the required commitment (Fawaz and Rajgopal, 2007). Increasing competition is forcing manufacturing organizations to transform their manufacturing pattern from mass manufacturing to lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing is fixated on the elimination of waste thereby enabling cost reduction (Vinodh and Balaji, 2011; and Vinodh and Chintha, 2011). Lean manufacturing involves a variety of principles and techniques, all of which have the same ultimate goal: to eliminate waste and non-value-added activities at every production or service process in order to give the most gratification to the customer (Hodge et al., 2011).
Lean manufacturing techniques include the leveled production, pull mechanism (Kanban), takt time, etc. These principles have mainly been applied in high volume flow shop environments where orders move through the production system in one direction in a constrained number of identifiable routing sequences (Slomp et al., 2009). Moreover, manufacturing firms operating in rapidly transmuting and highly competitive markets have embraced the continuous process improvement mindset. To reach its potential, lean must be adopted as a holistic business strategy, rather than an activity isolated in operations. The lean enterprise calls for the integration of lean practices across operations and other business functions (Fullerton et al., 2014). Although commonality has been observed amongst various techniques of lean manufacturing paradigm by various authors, most of them have not established the reasons for this commonality. Most of them have merely concluded that lean manufacturing techniques are to be implemented holistically for their benefits to the concerned organizations. In this paper, an attempt has been made to establish the reasons for the commonality amongst various lean manufacturing techniques.
|
