Background

According to Sundar, Balaji, and kumar, (2014), the concept of lean management was initiated to maximise the resources by utilising them in such a way that can minimise the waste. Later on, it was found that lean was helpful in responding to the fluctuation and competition of business environment. Due to fast fluctuating business environment, firms are forced to face several difficulties. Implementing lean management can lead to building of core competency in service and manufacturing organisation. In this paper, an outlook discussion of four journals have been continued on lean management. The discussion continues on lean manufacturing with relation to organisational culture and societal culture that can identify how relevant is the propositions of various cultural dimension and its effect on implementing and sustainability.

According to Pakdil and Leonard, (2015), the challenge to adopt lean manufacturing lies in the need to access the organisational culture. Japanese firms operate very well initially by using this system. Culture is the way to make the changes that is required to implement and sustain which drive the activities towards lean manufacturing. The particular lean process dimension rotate the concepts across the lean process in the whole organisation such as worker involvement, problem solving process, control and standardisation, perpetual quality improvement and efficient productivity. Organisational culture influences the success of sustaining and implementing the lean process. Organisational culture is the believe system that employees of the organisation share considering their traditions, acceptable methods, and working to attain the objectives. Rational culture is designed to focus on profit and competition not just to focus on customer satisfaction and productivity.

According to Sundara, Balajib, and Kumarc, (2014), characteristics of organisation emphasises on rational culture that can be more effective for lean process especially in terms of productivity, continuous quality enhancement, and efficiency. Moreover, Organisation culture affect the performance that affects the individual attitudes. While examining the culture, competitive value framework is used. Moreover, there are many frameworks affected by development, rational culture, groups, and hierarchical in the organisation. While combining and balancing culture, lean processes and organisational culture led to model and value propositions that identifies cultural dimensions, which can be useful to manage the lean processes. Analyst considers that definition of organisational culture is more relevant than societal culture especially when it comes to implement and sustain the concept of lean. Hofstede explains that organisations have a major influence on individual behaviour.

Not only lean practises can be implemented in Japanese culture, but also it has been very effective in Japan. This can be seen from the success of Japanese car manufacturing firms that they have attended in US too. For example- Toyota has adopted a balanced culture (attributes of both organisational culture and societal culture) in its operations and it is the reason of successful implementing the lean processes in the global business. Toyota production system, a well-known lean process that is a renowned example of lean manufacturing. It has been widened throughout the Toyota`s processes and all production system use lean processes.

Effect of Organizational Culture on Lean Implementation and Sustainability

According to Laureani, and Antony, (2018). Almost every business work to get and earn maximum profit by using its resources effectively and efficiently. Therefore, it employs various methods of production to best perform the operational activities. Lean manufacturing and six sigma are among those processes that can improve the business operations while managing the external business environment. Personal beliefs and value can be modified a bit according to business decisions. The incentive system and organisational objective are to be emphasized. Proportion of short-term group incentive is decreased when lean production has put into effect and making improvement. The typical culture of people remains a challenge for the company that anticipates to implement lean is to line up resources and people with a common effort of process of continuous improvement and learning. Lean manufacturing while considering the culture of each employee in the organisation, it creates too many barriers. The main set of failure approaches in implementing lean is “set of practises” which most organisations use where lean is known to be in a system that has both social and technical nature. In order to successfully imply lean in the organisation, continuous flow, and pull type in system changed time reduction, and inventory reduction. There always remain three important elements of lean such as time, effort, and money that considers evaluating the amount of time spent, the time taken to reach customers or the delivery time is a guiding principle. Evaluating the use of fund to see the problems due to lack of availability of resources. Moreover, Lean also ignores long traditions of enterprise theory and human resources management.  Level of employee participation in decision-making processes remain to a limited extend. Mean production is used to emphasize the negative outcomes of lean production for employee inspiration and well-being. The impact of lean leads to cost of human. A person challenges the lean work system that ask and claim for improvement in product quality and employee participation.  

Implementing new system of production based on Lean can produce a line of changes to which activities can be performed on the daily basis. The risk of failed effort of implementing the plan can carry to health of employees over time. Different studies show that there are several specific characteristics such as lower motivation level and job depression may be caused due to installation of regularly moving assembly line or fast assembly lines. Negative effect on people is considering critical which depends on continuous and fast production lines from where the material flow and product flow is not disturbed at any time. This standardisation is the reason why lean management led to reduction in work and increase in the autonomy of activities.  In addition to dissatisfaction and increased stress level, it also highlights the disconnection among the employees that are involved in the process but this can be successful only with the involvement of every employee in the team. A work environment without any involvement and no sense of teamwork in workers can lead to general feeling of distrust about the procedures and policies that management can try to implement in the lean strategy. For example- disconnection and no coordination among the employees can affect the trust and this shows how lean can easily be diverted from the main goal of developing and inspiring people. Lean does not focus or stress on employees through tight management measures inside the working business.

Irrelevant Effect of Societal Culture on Lean

According to Bortolotti, Boscari, and Danese, (2015), ultimately, lean is responsible for creating stressful workplaces, which are suffered by faster work lines, low job autonomy, and excessive workload. The main objectives of lean manufacturing is to eliminate the activities that do not provide value and is to be considered as waste.  Several analyst argue that various tools and techniques, human motivation, respect and empowerment must be taken into consideration but ultimately they create barriers for the operations. Nevertheless, the elements are needed to achieve long and sustainable growth, regardless of any particular industry but sometimes company only needs to achieve short-term goals.

In the case of Toyota, it is seen that it has a limited potential for innovation and creativity, worker isolation, harassment, dangerous condition of production line, poor quality of workers, excessive overtime, and accident cover-ups. Japanese automobiles, especially relating to culture such claims the reason that workers are disciplined, also face several problems. The reason can be well acquaint with family environment. The negative impact focuses on human factor that can be related to balanced culture in the enterprise. Not every public sector firm can use the aspects of claiming and implementing lean for example- variation in symptoms of patient arriving in hospital that cannot be predicted. Other aspects which public sector services emphasize especially in public sector that can reduce variety through modularisation. In this sector, customers have to be treated with high level of flexibility. In addition to this, public sector can use a mean to achieve greater output with high quality, same resources, rather than employing method of rapid reducing cost to release cash that create loss of jobs.

After the establishment of lean production system, there are various changes that are expected such as multitasking, capability of managing the work is improved, and they perform different activities at different time, which provide a flexibility in their work area, which finally requires satisfying the demand. Performing a repetitive task repeatedly in fix proportion of time or for longer time can lead to standardisation of activities that led lean to rely on just to achieve a goal. While workers once experienced are demanded to accomplish activities in such way that they are already established. It is also expected from them they will have to engage innovative and generate new idea on how to improve the current operations of establishment. On the same side, in the Japanese manufacturing organisations, it is noticed that they are regularly experiencing a sense of successfully implementing the lean system in the operations. The success was achieved because control measures and level of contribution of employees to define and device solutions continuously improve the work environment by making them feel motivated. Successful implementation results in focusing the continuous flow of information and knowledge training among the employees such as value stream mapping, U-line system, inventory control, pull system, production levelling, single minute exchange etc. According to Sundar, Balaji, and kumar, (2014), survey on employee’s perception identifies the affecting factors for successful transition of lean manufacturing system. Employees feel that organisation delegate an opportunity to understand the shop floor work environment and evaluate the cultural changes in their everyday lives. Lean transformation was successful in revealing the building blocks of lean transformation. From the review of employees, it is found that the lean factors was able to satisfy both critical external and internal intrinsic factors that includes commitment, belief, communication, and lean work. At last, it can be said that work methods can strengthen the involvement, commitment, and work identification of employees.

References

Bortolotti, T., Boscari, S. and Danese, P., (2015). Successful lean implementation: Organizational culture and soft lean practices. International Journal of Production Economics, 160, pp.182-201.

Laureani, A. and Antony, J., (2018). Leadership–a critical success factor for the effective implementation of Lean Six Sigma. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 29(5-6), pp.502-523.

Pakdil, F. and Leonard, K. M. (2017). Implementing and sustaining lean processes: the dilemma of societal culture effects. International Journal of production Research, 55(3), 700-717.

Sundara, A. N., Balajib, R. M., and Kumarc, S. (2014). A Review on Lean Manufacturing Implementation Techniques. Procedia engineering, 97(1), 1875-1885.