Bottom-Up Lean Practice Deployment in a Global Setting: A Case Study from the Pharmaceutical Industry

Abstract

In view of major social changes, such as the growing climate crisis, increased external expectations on the production sector demand an industrial transformation. Since transformations call for innovation, new lean practices will emerge locally at sites in production networks to cope with new challenges. But, how can new local lean practices be deployed for utilization by other parts of the company? Global production companies strive for broad over-all improvements within the network. This is often approached through a top-down deployment of a global lean framework, using various mechanisms. Lean standard development is a central mechanism for transferring best practices and lean knowledge within a corporate group. Anchored to well-established theories, such as innovation diffusion and plant network theory, prior lean transfer studies often take a cascading top-down perspective. In contrast, this study aims to explore lean practice diffusion through a bottom-up perspective. It explores the process of deploying new local lean practices to the corporate network. The empirical findings are based on a single case study at the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. The findings indicate that the bottom-up deployment process can be explained by four phases, ‘Piloting’, ‘Branding’, ‘Codifying Knowledge’ and ‘Making a Product’ that varies in degree of practice adaptation. The lean practice incorporation to a global lean framework is discussed around three conceptual deployment approaches called, ‘template’, ‘standard’ and ‘product’ deployment. The empirical insight contributes to the body of global lean literature by providing a more dynamic view of global lean frameworks, of which development depends on the underlying processes such as bottom-up practice incorporation. It also provides practitioners in global lean settings with valuable insight and a possibility to review internal global-local deployment processes within a corporate group to increase intra-organizational learning.