Design and assessment of lean manufacturing systems

Lean Manufacturing Systems (LMS) have attracted serious attention among practitioners and researchers in recent years. The principles and practices of Lean Manufacturing (LM) were not only implemented in manufacturing organizations, but also in service organizations. Although numerous articles dealing with the theory and practice of LM have been published, ironically, not many organizations have been successful in implementing the LMS and demonstrating a significant improvement in performance similar to that of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC). Many researchers have pointed out that one of the reasons for the same is that there is an improper understanding among the practitioners regarding LMS. However, implementing change management programs like LMS requires a thorough understanding of the constituents of LMS, performance measures of LMS, implementation procedure of LMS, and assessment of LMS. In addition, it is also necessary to analyze whether the implementation of LMS is justified. However, it is believed that such fundamental issues are not yet addressed completely in the literature of LM. Hence, there is a need to study the design and assessment of LMS. newline this research, a detailed literature review is carried out to understand the current status of LM and to identify the research gaps. To resolve some of the research gaps, a comparative analysis of various LM frameworks and frequency analysis of the LM elements is performed based on which a conceptual framework for LMS and an implementation framework for LMS is proposed. The proposed frameworks are validated using a case study. Similarly, a frequency analysis is carried out for to identify the performance measures of LM based on which a new Performance Measurement System (PMS) framework for LMS was proposed by modifying the balanced scorecard approach.