Adoption of lean manufaturing system with AIM of efficiency improvement within a late lean adopter company (a case study)

Abstract

“Lean manufacturing” (LM) and “Lean production” are the terms and concepts which have been introduced to industry world since 1990s. In these almost three decades many companies in various sectors have applied lean with aim of eliminating wastes and implementing continuous improvements in their organization. Although the capabilities and advantages of lean have been proven over the years, some companies are still hesitate to use this method. According to the theory of the “Diffusion of Innovation” (DOI), based on innovativeness factor, adopters to an innovation are divided into five categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Innovation can be considered as a new idea, procedure, practice, product and etc. Each of these categories has its own characteristics. The focus of this research is about adoption of LM in a laggard company. The case of this study (company X) is a furniture manufacturer in Quebec with mainly push production system. They are currently encountering with long delivery times, lack of space in the shop floor and unsatisfied production rate. Similar companies with the same problems as company X have improved their total efficiency with applying lean concept but our case has not been turned into LM until now and they are not very interested in implementing this procedure. Innovation-decision process has five stages: knowledge, persuasion, decision, implementation and confirmation. In this study, it is intended to help the company to reach to the third stage to make decision about lean implementation. Lean is a long and time taking journey and it will be longer in case of late adopters. The reason that they are reluctant in lean adoption is their ignorance about existing wastes and their impacts in the system. In such companies with traditional organizational structure, unawareness is the result of working in silos and having weak communications. In order to convince laggards to make decision about lean implementation, it is essential to break down the silos, improve interactions and deploy mutual synergy among them. Laggards will not accept an innovation until they completely become certain it is safe for them. In this research, we propose a road map to indicate the opportunity to increase total cycle efficiency from 29.4% to 78.3%.

Date	20 Sept 2018
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Michel Rioux (Supervisor)