Assessing lean implementation

Abstract

The lean management philosophy is applied to improve the productivity and customer satisfaction of an organization. Though lean implementations often fail or are not sustainable. Based on this, an assessment tool is developed. It consists of 24 criteria that are divided in the 4 categories: leadership, culture, knowledge, and process. The category culture is subdivided in: improvement, empowering, and partnering. The rating of each criterion works by interviews on the management and supervisor level, and surveys on all levels of the company. To improve the score of low rated criteria, different countermeasures for each criterion are named. By gathering the knowledge of different research and case studies, this tool can help companies to implement lean in a sustainable way.