CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1 General Overview:
Competition at global level has pressurized business organizations like the automotive, aerospace and services industries to pursue better means of doing business. If businesses are to survive in the long run, it has to put in place today, long-term infrastructures and facilities that would make it be abreast competition or at least be able to respond to competition at the right time. ‘It has been argued that business strategy and manufacturing (operational) flexibility affect the performance of an organization’ (Gupta & Somers, 1996), hence to achieve their objectives and goals, organizations have for many years relied on continuously improving their business and operational strategies, to reduce cost whilst improving quality and customer satisfaction in a bid to attain higher business result.
The business world has since witnessed the evolution of many business strategies and management systems. Production/operational Strategies like Total quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, Statistical Process Control (SPC), have been combined with Marketing and other Organizational Strategies like benchmarking, ‘defensive marketing’ (Fornell & Wernerfelt, 1987), management of change and so on, in a bid to achieve a better way of selling. Lean is one of those strategies, it has was a traditional automotive manufacturing set of principles or tool kit, but it has since been adopted in many other facets of life like service industry and so on. This research paper will focus on Lean. The author observes that many organizations seem to implement Lean without sufficient knowledge of the pros and cons or a critical assessment of the concept. The implication for organizations if Lean implementation fails to deli ...