An Exploratory Study on the Impact of an Organizational Performance through Lean Production Practices: A Case Study

Due to globalization, the world has become smaller and smaller with highly intense business competition. Thus, any organization, places more emphasis on looking for ways to survive based on reducing overall costs without decreasing product quality. Hence, identifying inefficient activities are becoming a core way to help manufactures decreasing in the operating costs while gaining a competitive advantage. However, few studies are concerned about searching for root causes of problems that are main obstacles for production improvement. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to explore on the impact of production performance and find a root cause for non-value-added activities through lean production and other quality tools application in a set of companies via a case study of SMEs. In short, bottleneck areas were identified for each company, and the problems were removed through increasing the processing time at those areas. The findings shows that motion and process wastes, compared to other wastes, are the main impacts for obstacles in production performance caused by poor workplace organization and lack of standardized work. The biggest barrier to lean production implementation is decentralization and changing the culture of workers, which requires the agreement of the top manager and involves of everyone in the entire SMEs.