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Abstract ID: 97
Abstract
Lean production is the primary modern manufacturing strategy. Lean has its origins in Japanese organizational culture. Imported to the west, companies quickly encountered cultural barriers that hindered complete success of lean production. The question addressed in this paper is how specific cultural variations are related to the success and effectiveness of lean production. Four categories of lean production principles are mapped against five dimensions of societal culture, with areas of similarities and differences identified. Using this model, one can define a societal culture by its five dimensions and map the dimensions against the lean categories. The identified areas of similarities and differences will describe the ease or difficulty of implementing the lean production categories for an organization from a given societal culture.
Keywords
Lean production, organizational culture, societal culture, lean implementation
1. Introduction
The last decades have shown a growing interest in the lean production philosophy. Lean production is the primary manufacturing strategy because of its ability to reduce costs, improve quality, improve speed, and increase flexibility of outputs simultaneously. Lean is also known by earlier terms of just-in-time and the Toyota Production System (TPS). The term TPS honors the roots of lean in the industrial engineering department of Toyota Corporation. In the 1980s, manufacturers in the United States and other western countries began to implement lean production techniques. The tools and techniques could be copied, but the results were harder to achieve. Lean has its origins in Japanese organizational culture and is built on Japanese societal culture. Importing techniques to the west, companies quickly encountered cultural barriers that hindered complete success of lean production. Western companies are now creating hybrids of Japanese organizational culture and Western societal culture to develop successful lean organizations. Today, production is shifting away from Japan and Western countries to many other countries, in Latin, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Asian regions. Each of these regions has unique societal and organizational cultures, and successful implementation of lean will require a unique blend of Japanese corporate culture with their societal and organizational culture. In this point of view, understanding societal cultural differences is crucial [1].
Organizations are becoming increasingly global and are dealing with cultural differences they face around the world. A search of the...