مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد اجرای ناب در شرکت های کوچک و متوسط – امرالد 2017

In the present global scenario, manufacturing organizations are mainly facing challenges from two directions. First, advanced manufacturing philosophies are emerging, which the existing methods are becoming obsolete (Jasti & Kodali, 2015). Secondly consumer thinking is changing and loyalty goes beyond a rational decision for superior perceived price-performance ratio. The customers have become more demanding for innovative products and services within a very short period of time and at less price (Tersine & Wacker, 2000; Lau, Jiang, Chan, & Ip, 2002; Ho, Lau, Lee, & Ip, 2005). Essentially to cope up with such challenges, the core idea behind strategy formulation by manufacturing firms nowadays, is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Hence, manufacturing firms operating in such rapidly changing and highly competitive market, for the past two decades have embraced the principles of lean thinking (Fullerton, Kennedy, & Widener, 2014). The word “lean” refers to lean manufacturing or lean production as it uses less of everything, compared to mass production (Wahab, Mukhtar, & Sulaiman, 2013). It only uses half of the human effort in the factory, half of the manufacturing space, half of investments in tools and half of the engineering to develop a new product in half of the time (Liker, 1998; Womack, Jones, & Ross, 1990). Also, it requires keeping far less than half the inventory on site, results in fewer defects, and produces a greater and ever growing quality of products (Womack, Jones, & Ross, 1990). Lean strategy is a management approach to manufacturing that strives to make organizations more competitive in the market by increasing efficiency and decreasing costs through elimination of non-value added steps (Garza-Reyes, Oriafige, Soriano-Meier, Forrester, & Harmanto, 2012). Lean manufacturing practices enhance manufacturing productivity by reducing setup times and work in process inventory, improving throughput times, and thus improving market performance (Tu, Vonderembse, Ragu-Nathan, & Sharkey, 2006). Various methods and tools that aim to improve performance of organizations are comprised under the lean strategy’s umbrella (Bhasin, 2012). The expression of “continuous improvement” is quite popular in lean manufacturing and the concept is associated mainly with total quality management, total productive maintenance, Just-in-time, six sigma, pull flow, low set up, controlled processes, human resource management and other approaches (McKone, Schroeder, & Cua, 1999).