Title: Scope for lean implementation: a survey of 127 Indian industries

Authors: Bhim Singh, S.K. Garg, S.K. Sharma

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Galgotias College of Engineering and Technology, 1-Knowledge park – 2, Greater Noida – 201306, UP, India. ' Department of Mechanical and Production Engineering, Delhi Technological University, Delhi – 110042, India. ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Institute of Technology (NIT), Kurukshetar – 136119, Haryana, India

Abstract: Lean manufacturing is a plethora of principles that focus on cost reduction by identifying and eliminating non-value added activities. Indian industry is still struggling to implement lean principles and philosophies. Through this paper, an attempt has been made to identify the scope for lean implementation in Indian industry which forces the Indian industry to adopt lean manufacturing initiatives. A questionnaire is prepared after identifying 26 issues of lean implementation with discussion to industrial personals and sent to 300 Indian industries. The responses of 127 industries were received on a five-point scale ranging from very low to very high. By applying factor analysis, 26 lean issues were reduced in to five broad categories, i.e., customers issues, organisational issues, supplier issues, market issues and top management issues. Further descriptive statistics was used to find the importance of lean issues to Indian industry.

Keywords: lean manufacturing; lean implementation; factor analysis; Indian industry; survey; India.

DOI: 10.1504/IJRAPIDM.2010.034253

International Journal of Rapid Manufacturing, 2010 Vol.1 No.3, pp.323 - 333

Published online: 30 Jul 2010 *

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