Evaluating Impact of Lean Manufacturing Initiatives in Indian Industry

Lean is an approach deployed for realizing continuous improvement thorugh elimination of all kinds of waste in production processes to raise the effectiveness of production systems. Due to its popularity, many firms are using Lean as a tool to raise the productivity level with quality aspects. At current situation, Lean manufacturing (LM) has grown to be a worldwide trend. This is an exploratory study of lean manufacturing implementation in Indian Manufacturing Industries. The present study depicts that the respondent organizations have successfully reaped significant manufacturing performance enhancements over reasonable period of time by holistically deploying various LM initiatives. The results of this study have revealed that the major difficulty to implement lean manufacturing system in an organization is the lack of understanding lean concepts and lack of appropriate understanding about lean techniques adopted by the organizations. Thus for successful implementation of LM program in organizations, it becomes mandatory for the manufacturing managers to understand the functioning and interaction of the different facets of LM, so that the concept can fulfill its true potential.