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1. Introduction
Twenty-first century manufacturing is characterized by customized products. This has led to the complex production planning and control systems making mass production of goods challenging. Many organizations, particularly automotive organizations, struggled in the new customer driven and globally competitive markets. These factors present a big challenge to organizations to look for new tools and methods to continue moving up the ladder in the changed market scenario. While some organizations continued to grow on the basis of economic constancy, others struggled because of their lack of understanding of the changed customer mind-sets and cost practices. To overcome this situation and to become more profitable, many manufacturers turned to “lean manufacturing” (LM). The goal of LM is to be highly responsive to customer demand by reducing waste. LM aims at producing products and services at the lowest cost and as fast as required by the customer.
The lean concept originated in Japan after the second world war when Japanese manufacturers realized that they could not afford the massive investment required to rebuild devastated facilities. Toyota produced automobiles with lesser inventory, human effort, investment, and defects and introduced a greater and ever growing variety of products. LM gives the manufacturers a competitive edge by reducing cost and improving productivity and quality. Various authors have documented quantitative benefits of lean implementation such as improvement in production lead time, processing time, cycle time, set up time, inventory, defects and scrap, and overall equipment effectiveness. The various qualitative benefits include improved employee morale, effective communication, job satisfaction, standardized housekeeping, team decision making, etc.
The generic term “LM” came into existence from the International Motor Vehicle Programme researchers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The project was focussed to bridge the significant performance gap between Western and Japanese automotive industries. Womack et al. (1990) through their book The Machine that Changed the World popularized lean concept in manufacturing. In early 1990s LM concept was viewed as a counter-intuitive alternative to traditional Fordism manufacturing model (Womack et al., 1990). The modern concept of LM/management can be traced to the Toyota Production System (TPS), pioneered by Japanese engineers Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. Sugimori et al. (1977) portray TPS made of two components – Just-In-Time (JIT) production system and a...