From successful to sustainable Lean production – the case of a Lean Prize Award Winner

Abstract

Many improvement programmes often fail to sustain over an extended period of time. Previous research suggests that a similar set of factors influence the success and sustainability of an improvement programme. The purpose of this paper is to make a distinction between the success and sustainability of improvement programmes, and to identify mechanisms that specifically contribute to the sustainability. In this paper, we study a sustainable improvement programme from the perspective of complexity theories that stress the importance of studying change as a dynamic process of interacting elements and events unfolding in time. We conducted a longitudinal, indepth case study of a Swedish Lean Prize Award Winner where a Lean improvement programme was studied over 9 years. An improvement programme is successful if goals are achieved and the targeted problems are resolved. Furthermore, the first-order sustainability means the ability to sustain results and the second-order sustainability means the ability to keep an improvement programme alive. The lessons identified from complexity theories, such as destabilising the organisation, ensuring novelty and constant flow of change or self-organisation at the team level, are examples of mechanisms important to achieve the sustainability of the improvement programme.

Lean Manufacturing Adoption in Malaysia: A Systematic Literature Review

“…Sustaining lean research theme might also be addressed as sustainable lean, lean sustainability, or lean maturity. From the international view, there were at least one published study every year that addressed this research theme since 2004 including; Veech ( 2004 2014), Wuestman and Casey (2015), Mohd Yusof and Aoki ( 2016), Pakdil and Leonard (2017), and Poksinska and Swartling (2018). This is because, sustaining lean adoption has become the major concern among LM scholars and practitioners worldwide (Bhasin & Burcher, 2006;Jadhav, Mantha, & Rane, 2014;Kallage, 2006;Tenescu & Teodorescu, 2014).…”

Lean Transformation Sustainability Models

“…Majority of the researchers like Hines, Found, Griffiths, and Harrison (2008), Testani and Ramakrishnan (2010), Marchwinski (2014), Sisson and Elshennawy (2015), and Poksinska and Swartling (2018) only reported success factors of LTS identified from successfully sustained lean companies. Other group of researchers proposed models to overcome barriers and challenges in sustaining lean transformation efforts (Murti, 2009;Pentlicki, 2014;Schlichting, 2009;Turesky & Connell, 2010).…”

Lean production as a means of ensuring the sustainable development of agricultural enterprises

“…Practical cases are a powerful tool of definition of the road-map of lean production concept implementation, that causes the appropriate scientists' interest to this sphere [2; 3; 9; 10; 11]. Lean production concept as a theoretical background for the further research is reviewed in the B. Poksinska and D. Swartling research [2]. The authors define the opportunities and benefits provided by the lean concept implementation as an improvement programme through the introduction of a practical case of biopharmaceutical company.…”

“…Lean production concept can be described both as a philosophy as well as a tool for production processes improvement [2].…”