The survival of any organization depends upon its competitive edge. Even though Lean is one of the most powerful quality improvement methodologies, nearly twothirds of the Lean implementations results in failures and less than one-fifth of those implemented have sustained results. One of the...

Waste removal increases the profitability of any business. Processes are classified into value added and non-value added. The seven deadly wastes that could exist in any manufacturing process originated in Japan and are defined in the Toyota production system (TPS). The main goal became removing...

Purpose: Since the emergence of Lean Manufacturing many organizations strived to implement it. Nonetheless, sustainable Lean transformation is not as easy as to be simply achieved. Several aspects need to be taken into account before Lean implementation which national and organizational culture...

Today’s rough competition at a global level in all spheres of activity imposes companies worldwide to make sustained efforts in order to improve their products, services and processes. The automotive industry has always provided valuable examples of companies that achieved business excellence...

Purpose: ‘Company Specific Production Systems’ (XPS) aim to adopt ‘best practice’ across plants within a company. A pertinent issue in the literature involves the constraints in the possibilities of realising such an adoption. This paper addresses to what extent and how a Norwegian...

Medication errors occurring in hospitals are a growing national concern. These medication errors and their related costs (or wastes) are seen as major factors leading to increased patient safety risks and increased waste in the hospital setting. This article presents a study in which sixteen...

Purpose: The goal of this work was to investigate the managerial practices of today to understand if Toyota is sheltering themselves from these newer practices or embracing them like most believe. Design/methodology/approach: This work utilizes a new form of data mining named Latent Semantic...

Over the last five decades the Toyota Production System (TPS) has evolved from an advanced sociotechnical concept in manufacturing to a participative design for large-scale change management. Toyota has been able to sustain a strategic competitive advantage by applying TPS as a process...