BACKGROUND Lean and Six Sigma are business management strategies commonly used in production industries to improve process efficiency and quality. During the past decade, these process improvement techniques increasingly have been applied outside the manufacturing sector, for example, in health care and in software development. This article concerns the potential use of Lean and Six Sigma in im...

A value stream oriented organisational structure following the Lean philosophy, often is seen as contradictory to the concept of self directed teamwork (SDT). Whereas SDT is broadly defined by the takeover of responsibilities for a certain range of management tasks by a team within defined boundaries Lean is defined as an approach of continuous improvement for process design and development wit...

Purpose The main aim of this research is to compare and distinguish between two salient means for improving the management of, and leveraging the effectiveness of, supply chains. Leanness and agility have been considered recently as prominent and successful means for competing. The paper examines the literature on leanness and agility thinking including their definitions, importance and practic...

One of the most important parts of the green supply chain management (GSCM) is the green supplier. The green supplier selection process has a vague nature. Therefore, specific approaches, such as fuzzy, are necessary during their evaluation. On the other hand, the choice of a coherent and integrated strategy is vital to achieve lean and green production. Accordingly, the present study aimed to ...

Lebanese industries are growing so fast and expanding their businesses while managing their time, inventory, labor, quality and other production factors in order to increase productivity and output while reducing waste. For that, lean manufacturing aims to reduce the inventory and gain more profits while getting a better quality of the goods delivered to the customers. The aim of this Article i...

Supply chain environment is more dynamic and unpredictable than the past; therefore, it needs to be highly flexible in order to reconfigure in response to changes in their environment on the spur of the moment. This study presents a framework for supplier selection based on product-related and organization-related characteristics of the suppliers to be more competitive in the market and flexibl...

With the ongoing global pressure of cost cutting and quality focus, many companies have been implementing “lean manufacturing” concepts to survive in this competitive marketplace. “Lean” concepts have found their place in manufacturing and service industries; an important key to eliminating waste and delivering value to the customers. Thus, it is imperative that engineering management graduates...

Lean Manufacturing concept is well described in the literature in the context of low-mix high-volume production. There are numerous case studies proving outstanding benefits of implementation Lean principles. Nowadays enterprises have to face the problem of high variety of products and dynamically changing demand. Lean tools and methods known from repetitive production do not always fit to high...

Physical factory layout redesigns or changes of the supply chain infrastructure involve high costs. Through simulation and value stream mapping, managers can see the impacts before the implementation and transform the organization into a lean one at minimal cost. In this paper, we investigate some relevant lean manufacturing literature where lean principles and tools are presented or utilized. ...

Lean manufacturing has been the buzzword in the area of manufacturing for past few years especially in Japan. The Kanban system is one of the manufacturing strategies for lean production with minimal inventory and reduced costs. However, the Kanban system is not being implemented widely by manufacturing companies in Malaysia. Thus, the objectives of this case study are 1) to determine how does ...