Assessing lean manufacturing within SMEs according to firms organizational characteristics

Lean manufacturing (LM) has been established in the last decades as a prominent paradigm in production context; in fact, companies of different dimensions and various businesses have invested in the implementation of lean practices inspired by the principles belong to “Toyota Production System”. LM practices and related tools are widely used in every step of production process in a large range of companies. Most of these industries have obtained impressive results; however, many companies are struggling to apply the LM practices. Furthermore, they are not able to perceive and recognize the implementation level of these practices. Nevertheless LM practices have been defined thanks to various studies during last thirty years; the outcomes of their implementation have not been sufficiently assessed in regards to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The emerging gaps highlight the lack of assessment techniques capable of assess the outcomes of LM implementation based on certain firm-specific inputs. Moreover, the importance to investigate the relationship between organizational characteristics (product vs. process focus, volume, variety, production mix, firm peculiarities and so on) and the implementation of lean practices has been largely ignored in research, similarly as in the case of relationship between firm strategic priorities and LM practices relevance. Therefore, the current gaps address the development of an effective methodology to assess the level of LM practices implementation according to firm characteristics and strategy. Therefore, the aim of this research is to formulate the main features of a novel assessment tool which enables to evaluate the level of maturity of a lean transformation program within SMEs.