How to foster Sustainable Continuous Improvement: A cause-effect relations map of Lean soft practices

Costa, Federica; Lispi, Leonardo; Staudacher, Alberto Portioli; Rossini, Matteo; Kundu, Kaustav; Cifone, Fabiana Dafne

doi:10.1016/j.orp.2018.100091

Cited by 77 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 86 publications

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“…Employee involvement and commitment is strongly related to the success of continuous improvement (Coyle-Shapiro 2002;Jurburg et al 2017;Lleo et al 2017;Costa et al 2019). Consequently, various antecedents are reported in the production and operations management literature to increase employee involvement and commitment in improvement programmes, such as empowerment, participation in goal setting, decentralised decision-making, performance measurement system, financial and non-financial rewards, training and having a common improvement method, i.e.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Consequently, various antecedents are reported in the production and operations management literature to increase employee involvement and commitment in improvement programmes, such as empowerment, participation in goal setting, decentralised decision-making, performance measurement system, financial and non-financial rewards, training and having a common improvement method, i.e. a standard set of steps and tools used during improvement projects that promotes a common understanding of how to come to improvements (Dow, Samson, and Ford 1999;Cua, McKone, and Schroeder 2001;Brun 2011;Sila and Ebrahimpour 2003;Marodin and Saurin 2013;Costa et al 2019). Training has indeed been promoted as an important mechanism to facilitate continuous improvement as it increases employee's selfefficacy for continuous improvement (Ahmed, Loh, and Zairi 1999;Bevilacqua, Ciarapica, and De Sanctis 2017;Aloini, Martini, and Pellegrini 2011).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Training, employee involvement and continuous improvement – the moderating effect of a common improvement method

Assen

2020

Production Planning & Control

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Training and the use of a common improvement method have been promoted as important mechanisms to facilitate continuous improvement. As a result, organisations invested heavily in purchasing standard, off-the-shelf improvement methods and massive training of employees in these types of methods and the associated tools and techniques. In practice, however, many improvement programmes are not as successful as initially expected. The question is whether training of all employees in the common improvement method leads to more employee involvement and participation and hence higher levels of continuous improvement? Based on a sample of 208 respondents from different organisations, this study shows that training for continuous improvement and the use of a common improvement method are indeed positively related to employee involvement, but it also shows that there is a negative interaction effect between training and the use of a common improvement method such that the higher (the adherence to) the use of a common improvement method the more reduced the positive effect of training on employee involvement is. This study also shows that employee involvement partly mediates the impact of training on continuous improvement. However, the higher the adherence to a common improvement method, the lower the indirect effect of training via employee involvement on continuous improvement is. Training should therefore not only be given about the common improvement method, but especially broad in the field of continuous improvement.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Training, employee involvement and continuous improvement – the moderating effect of a common improvement method

Assen

2020

Production Planning & Control

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“…This approach is not only time consuming due to taking experts' opinions, but may also induce bias due to human intervention, which poses risk of inclusion or exclusion of a significant relation between two factors. Therefore, MMDE, based on entropy calculations, proves to be the only scientific method to provide threshold value without human judgement [38] and has been utilised by several researchers in different domains [35,39,40]. Furthermore, statistically validated models of critical indicators are then obtained by employing the SEM approach for both groups.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Integrated Decision-Making Approach for Cause-And-Effect Analysis of Sustainable Manufacturing Indicators

et al. 2020

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Sustainability is a growing concern for manufacturing companies, as they are major contributors to pollution and consume a substantial portion of the world´s natural resources. Sustainable manufacturing can reduce waste, conserve energy and increase resource efficiency. However, one of the main challenges facing manufacturing organisations to put sustainability into practice is the lack of understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships between critical indicators of sustainable manufacturing. To overcome this challenge, a novel, rigorous and integrated framework, composed of four quantitative methods, is proposed to analyse critical indicators of sustainable manufacturing. The analysis is based on responses from both academic and industry experts. These four methods including DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory), the MMDE (maximum mean de-entropy) algorithm, ISM (interpretive structural modelling) and SEM (structural equation modelling) are uniquely integrated to present statistically validated relationships between critical indicators using information on varying degrees of relationship between them. The final cause-and-effect models for the respondent groups (i.e., researchers and industry experts) are further validated through gathering the viewpoints of a researcher and an industry practitioner for its robustness. The novelty of our research lies in: (1) proposing a novel and integrated rigorous quantitative framework combined with qualitative research method; (2) applying the proposed framework to analyse contextual relationships between critical indicators of implementing sustainability, in the manufacturing sector as a whole, which to the best of authors' knowledge is the first of its kind; and (3) comparing and contrasting results of researchers and industry practitioners' groups along with a check of their validation and robustness.

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“…The term labour flexibility is used to indicate the relative ease in which workers can be relocated between organizational units (Frye, 1974). An important characteristic of the workforce is the development of multiple skills (Wallace et al, 2004;Costa et al, 2019); the larger a worker's range of skills, the more flexible is the worker, either in terms of the variety of goods and/or services he/she can produce, or in terms of the range of job assignments (Sawhney, 2013). This flexibility in turn can be used as a buffer protecting throughput from variability, specifically in production contexts with high variability (Treleven, 1989;Kher & Fredendall, 2004).…”

Section: Labour Flexibility In Drc Shopsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The use of labour flexibility for output control in workload controlled flow shops: A simulation analysis

Staudacher¹,

Costa²,

Thürer³

2020

10.5267/j.ijiec

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Workload control theory seeks to align capacity and demand to improve delivery performance. However, workload control researchers mainly focused on input control, which regulates the input of work to the production system, thereby neglecting output control, which uses capacity adjustments to regulate the outflow of the work. Moreover, few existing studies on output control investigate a temporarily increase in capacity. This paper introduces a new search direction for output control which does not require an increase in capacity-labour flexibility. Idle operators can move from their workstation to another, thus temporarily increasing the output of that workstation without extra capacity. Using simulation of a five workstations flow shop line, we highlight the positive performance effect of labour flexibility. However, this comes at the cost of high labour movement. Introducing a load-based constraint on when workers are allowed to move significantly reduces labour movement, while realizing most of the performance improvement observed for unconstrained labour movement. This has important implications for future research and practice.

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How to foster Sustainable Continuous Improvement: A cause-effect relations map of Lean soft practices

Cited by 77 publications

References 86 publications

Training, employee involvement and continuous improvement – the moderating effect of a common improvement method

Training, employee involvement and continuous improvement – the moderating effect of a common improvement method

An Integrated Decision-Making Approach for Cause-And-Effect Analysis of Sustainable Manufacturing Indicators

The use of labour flexibility for output control in workload controlled flow shops: A simulation analysis

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