Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
Lean manufacturing is widely used and an accepted philosophy across all industries (Womack et al., 1990). Almost all lean practices were first introduced by the Toyota Company in manufacturing industry (Tang et al., 2005; Pil and Fujimoto, 2007). Initially an objective of the Toyota philosophy was to eliminate waste and enable cost reduction at the manufacturing level (Hicks, 2007; Anand and Kodali, 2008; Vinodh and Balaji, 2011). From research, the waste identified in the manufacturing function are over production, over processing, waiting time, transportation, defects, inventory, storage (Hines and Rich, 1997; Pattanaik and Sharma, 2009) and under utilization of employees (Vinodh and Balaji, 2011). Sharma and Shah (2015) assessed leanness of warehousing waste and suggested a clustering-based framework to improve overall picking productivity. Over a period of time organizations recognize the importance of lean and adopt it throughout an enterprise to remain competitive. Lean enterprise can be defined as the collective and synchronized effort of people, to continuously improve the efficiency of all the functions. It involves lean methods, culture and partnerships of an enterprise (Cil and Turkan, 2012). To survive in this era of globalization every organization needs to achieve leanness through better performance, business policies, strategies and working environments. Achieving a lean enterprise is related to an improvement in the way of performing operations at different levels and functions using lean principles and practices. Leanness cannot be achieved in a short time span; it is a long-term process requiring changes in every function (Narang, 2008) of an enterprise. For efficient decision making any system should be in alignment with lean goals (Cottyn et al., 2011). This process of performing every operation efficiently in alignment of warehouse goals is referred to as lean transformation. The lean transformation can be started by implementing lean philosophy at a single functional level followed by other cross-functions and later covering the whole enterprise.
This study focusses on warehouse operations as it contributes substantially to the vital portion of total waste and costs (de Koster et al., 2007) in any manufacturing firm. Warehouse design and control are identified as crucial tasks in warehouse management (Baker and Canessa, 2009). Although there is not any precise definition of lean warehouse, it can be defined as...