How to Facilitate Implementation of Lean Concept?

Abstract

The paper reveals to the challenges and barriers to be faced and overcomed while implementing lean concept. Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or simply "Lean", is a practice, which regards the use of resources for any work other than the creation of value for the end customer, as waste, and thus a target for elimination. Its main goals are to eliminate waste, reduce the need for managing large inventories, and provide optimum quality at the least cost by making quality control decisions an immediate part of the manufacturing process. Lean concept has been proven to be transferrable and applicable to a wide variety of industries and services. Although it is one of the popular concepts with a number of tools, techniques and technologies available to improve operational performance, and a lot of companies started implementing lean concept, only about ten percent or even less of the companies achieved significant results. The aim of the paper is to identify the main challenges and barriers that companies face with while implementing Lean concept and measures that could be taken to facilitate it. Synthesis of scientific literature allowed finding out the core principles of Lean concept. On the base of conducted analysis and synthesis, the main groups of barriers were identified and recommendations how to overcome them were presented. Authors of the paper present the conceptual model of Lean implementation process which includes success factors, barriers and progress measurement indicators. The results of this research can be useful for scientists analysing this topic from theoretical and empirical perspective, and for practicians implementing lean concept in business.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n13p177