Although research on the adoption of lean manufacturing in the furniture industry in emerging economies is slowly progressing, its implementation has been emphasized by researchers and practitioners. Research on this scope is therefore limited, particularly when compared to the vast amount of scholarly studies contributed to successful implementation of lean in the developed countries. To support the narrow body of knowledge on this under-researched scope, this paper presents the current shortfalls of implementing the lean manufacturing in terms of motives, barriers, challenges, and applications. To address these issues, a methodological approach was implemented in two tiers. Firstly, a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art literature on the issues was performed followed by an analytic approach using a survey on 148 companies in Malaysia to finalize the research. Upon validation of the analyses, the results revealed that most of the lean companies agreed that the reasons for lean implementation are to increase efficiency, to clean up and organize the workplace, and to increase utilization of space. Non-lean companies believe that issues related to knowledge are the reasons for not undertaking lean implementation. However, lean companies believe that the obstacles are more about employee-related issues including lack of labor resources, lack of implementation know-how, and employee resistance to change. Lean companies also face challenges in the form of technical knowledge, training, and financial resources during the early phase of lean implementation. In addition, only three applications e 5S, employee training, and quality control e were found to be useable in the Malaysian wood and furniture industry. These findings present a critical view of the current shortfalls of lean implementation in the wood and furniture industry throughout Malaysia and other emerging economies.

Introduction

After the publication of the ground-breaking work “The Machine that Changed the World” (Womack et al., 1990), lean underwent a significant and unprecedented evolution over the years, subsequently being unanimously accepted as a highly beneficial practice (Bhamu and Singh Sangwan, 2014). Over the course of time, a number of prominent researchers have explored the various range of tools for lean manufacturing (LM), since it has successfully proved in a large variety of industries with many successful cases recorded in the literature (Pearce et al., 2018a). An increasing number of literature studies have found that LM has significantly contributed to the success of companies in developed countries (e.g. Japan, the US, the UK, Germany, and Italy). Until now this methodology has only been applied to developed countries, and there is little effort taken to investigate LM implementation in developing countries (Amoako-Gyampah and Gargeya, 2001; Nawanir et al., 2013). On the other hand, the in- * Corresponding author. fluences of lean manufacturing in the furniture industry is not promising. An evidence indicates there is no respondents from wood and furniture company has implemented lean practices in China (Huo et al., 2019). The forest based (Finnish SMEs) companies were at a very early stage of development and may not have matured sufficiently within company thinking (D’Amato et al., 2018). Yet, LM is a new manufacturing paradigm especially for the furniture industry in Malaysia. This condition brings out a fundamental question: “What are the motives for the lean manufacturing adoption?”