Breaking the Barrier of Service Hostility: A Lean Approach to Achieve Operational Excellence

Abstract

Due to globalization industries are rapidly growing throughout the world which leads to many manufacturing organizations. But recently service industries are beginning to emerge in large numbers almost in all parts of the world including some developing countries. In this context organizations need to have strong competitive advantage over their rivals to achieve their strategic business goals. Manufacturing industries are adopting many methods and techniques in order to achieve such competitive edge. Over the last decades manufacturing industries have been successfully practicing lean concept to optimize their production lines. Due to its huge success in manufacturing context lean has made its way into the service industry. From past literature it has been observed that there hasn't been any significant research development of lean applicability for service industry. In fact very little importance has been addressed to service in the area of operations management. Service industries are far behind than manufacturing industries in terms of operations improvement. It will be a hectic job to transfer the lean concept from production floor to service back/front office which will obviously yield possible improvement. Service processes are not as visible as production processes and can be very complex. Lack of research in this area made it quite difficult for service industries as there are no standardized frameworks for successfully implementing lean concept in service organization. The purpose of this research paper is to capture the present scenario of service industry in terms of lean implementation. Thorough analysis of past literature will be done on the applicability and understanding of lean in service structure. Classification of research papers will be done and critical factors will be unveiled which leads to a conceptual framework for implementing lean in service industry to achieve operational excellence.