Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent an important component of the economy in both developed and developing countries. Nowadays, the competitive industrial environment is encouraging these companies to redesign their manufacturing practices. Lean manufacturing (LM) has been widely implemented in several industries and has been shown to have had a positive impact on the performance and development of companies. This review aims to examine this impact on the performance of manufacturing companies, to emphasize the recent progress of LM amongst SMEs worldwide, and to show that most successful LM initiatives are those implemented in SMEs and large companies. However, very small businesses (VSBs) are struggling to introduce LM into their management systems. A new approach has been developed to establish a new lean implementation framework that could be adapted to the specific context of VSBs.
The COVID-19 crisis hit the economy hard, it is a global situation of declining activity due to a highly contagious disease which has pushed the world to the brink of a deeper recession than ever. Small and medium-sized enterprises constitute 92% of the Moroccan economic fabric, they are among the organizations most seriously affected by the current pandemic. This paper examines the problems that exist before and during this crisis, in order to raise major challenges and choose the ideal approach that will strengthen the competitiveness of these companies. the analysis is based on secondary data and the literature to demonstrate the different constraints of these companies and to show the importance of lean manufacturing as the guarantor of industrial performance. the main question is how the alignment of Lean principals goes well with the desired improvement and with the constraints posed by this crisis, the primary objective of Lean is to provide the means to succeed and accelerate competitiveness. Finally, these circumstances can be a real opportunity to assist Small and Medium Moroccan companies to integrate the methods they need, and “Lean approach” is one of the best performance solutions to adopt in a post COVID-19.
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