A Systematic Literature Review on Recent Lean Research: State‐of‐the‐art and Future Directions

Abstract

Lean management (LM) has attracted the interest of scientists and practitioners since 1990, when Womack et al. (Womack, J.P., Jones, D.T. and Roos, D. (1990). The Machine that Changed the World. New York, NY: Rawson Associates) popularized the Japanese manufacturing approach aimed at eliminating waste to improve operational performance and customer satisfaction. Over the years, the lean concept has evolved becoming a managerial paradigm applicable to different sectors and processes with impressive results. This heterogeneity of implementations and settings makes the recent LM literature diverse and fragmented, and an extensive analysis of the latest contributions on this field is lacking. To address this gap, the authors propose a systematic literature review (SLR) of 240 articles published in 25 peer-reviewed academic journals from January 2003 to December 2015. The purpose is to analyse the recent trends in this area and to provide a framework that organizes lean researched issues into mature, intermediate and nascent, based on their position in the research life cycle. Starting from the gaps that the SLR highlights, the authors suggest conducting lean research in the following directions: (a) grounding lean studies on existing managerial theories; (b) addressing service settings such as banking/finance, public sector and education; (c) exploring the role of national culture through cross-country comparisons; (d) defining and conceptualizing 'lean-x' processes; (e) understanding the relationships between lean and safety/environmental issues, and (f) unveiling the effects on social outcomes. Finally, the proposed framework helps scholars find issues not sufficiently explored that require theory-building research (to move from nascent to intermediate) or theory-testing research (to move from intermediate to mature).

Towards the integration of lean principles and optimization for agricultural production systems: a conceptual review proposition

“…The most recent systematic reviews on lean thinking are about the service sector (including banking/finance, the public sector, and education). 46 To the best of the authors' knowledge, no literature reviews have been published on the use of LM in agricultural production chains. Consequently, a review of uses of lean thinking in agriculture and agri-chains may make a significant important contribution toward these systems, helping to support efficiency-oriented redesign to seek both operational efficiency 47 and performance improvements.…”

“…A bibliographical search was conducted on investigations of agricultural supply chains, and it was found that no significant literature reviews had been done on LM developments in agricultural production. The most recent systematic reviews on lean thinking are about the service sector (including banking/finance, the public sector, and education) …”

A Systematic Literature Review for Better Understanding of Lean Driven Sustainability

“…The study revealed an insufficiency of existing management systems and practices at successfully dealing with issues that occur in the social sustainability pillar. Fortunately, Danese et al, (2017) conducted an SLR on recent lean research and its future direction [130]. The authors identified relationships of lean-green, and lean-social sustainability among issues to be tackled in the future research studies.…”

“…The applicability of both lean and sustainability is quite extensive and expandable. Several past studies concluded that both concepts are relevant for, and versatile enough to, accommodate needs of any industry [8,88,130,171,172]. Evidence of both separate [28] and co-deployment [173] of frameworks were prominent in the literature since early 1990s and early 2000s, respectively.…”

“…Well-established maturity of lean could provide a good foundation for new frameworks and paradigms [277]. Existing gap for lean-X concepts have been highlighted in the literature [130].…”