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Introduction
The printing industry in China is growing rapidly. In 2010, there were nearly 106,400 printing enterprises with 4.46 million employees in China, and the gross industrial output value reached 92 billion US dollars, ranking third in the world (Research and Markets, 2011). According to Ding, in 2014, the profits in China's printing industry increased 9.3 percent year on year and it was ranked second worldwide. In 2014, the official statistics showed that China's printing industry output exceeded 160 billion US dollars. Along with this growth of industry, competition among printing companies has also intensified. Like most manufacturing industries, improving quality and productivity to gain a competitive advantage has always been a major focus for the printing industry (Lyu, 1996; Xu et al. , 2008). To remain competitive, printing companies have to improve their present production process to be efficient and lean in their internal operations.
Lean is a management philosophy focused on identifying and eliminating waste throughout a product's entire value stream (De Treville and Antonakis, 2006; Narasimhan and Swink, 2006; Shah and Ward, 2003, 2007). One lean manufacturing mechanism used to improve organizational performance is the kaizen event (Bradley and Willett, 2004; Melnyk and Calantone, 1998; Vasilash, 1997). A kaizen event is a focused and structured continuous improvement project, using a dedicated cross-functional team to address a targeted work area, to achieve specific goals in an accelerated timeframe (usually one week or shorter). The use of kaizen appears to have increased significantly in recent years (Bane, 2002; Melnyk and Calantone, 1998).
However, the concept of kaizen has rarely been applied in printing industry for improving productivity and few published papers show how kaizen fits into the operational practices in printing industry (Tay, 2008). There is little literature that links the principles of kaizen to the printing industry. In particular, the use of lean tools to the printing industry is sparsely studied. Despite the potentially promising benefits of kaizen, the current literature lacks an understanding on the application of lean tools that would suit the printing operations. On the whole, it is unclear from existing empirical research and the practitioner literature whether the use of kaizen would be beneficial to the printing environment, and whether it can lead to a positive change in...