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1. Introduction
Lean has been proven as the most appropriate tool to improve operational performance for the organizations (Shah and Ward, 2007; Arya and Choudhary, 2015). It has evolved over time, and its application is not limited to a particular sector (Hines et al., 2004). Success stories of lean can be found in manufacturing (Zahraee, 2016), construction (Dakhli et al., 2017), textile (Adikorley et al., 2017), service (Abdelhadi, 2016) and other industrial sectors (Bhamu and Sangwan, 2014). Still, the interest revealed in lean by small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is limited (Hu et al., 2015; Shokri and Nabhani, 2015). SME sector is one of the fastest growing industrial sectors, especially in developing economies. This sector not only significantly contributes to nation’s GDP but also plays a vital role in employment creation (Singh et al., 2010a, 2010b). SMEs are complementary to large industries as ancillary units, and this sector contributes enormously to the socio-economic development of the country (Timans et al., 2014; Vidyadhar et al., 2016). In other words, the growth of SME sector follows the economic development of the country. Despite these contributions, this sector faces the following question: What to do, to remain in the competition? Consequently, SMEs started adopting lean in its production system and supply chain.
The successful adoption of lean requires continuous monitoring and measuring the degree of implementation (Wong et al., 2014). Researchers named it as “leanness”. Leanness assessment is defined as a procedure that needs to be performed at regular intervals by a value stream implementing lean to examine and quantify the extent of leanness and benefits attained (Narayanamurthy and Gurumurthy, 2016). It needs to be measured over multiple periods to arrive at a particular direction for future improvements.
The majority of the studies focused on the various aspects of lean implementation (Shah and Ward, 2007; Hines et al., 2004; Shah and Ward, 2007; Alaskari et al., 2016); despite this, a very few have measured its adoption level (Vidyadhar et al., 2016; Wong et al., 2014). Most of the leanness measurement studies focused on large industries (Zanjirchi et al., 2010). Therefore, literature lacks the leanness assessment framework for SMEs. In this study, we aimed to fill...