Literature Review of Lean Manufacturing in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Abstract

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) represent an important component of the economy in both developed and developing countries. Nowadays, the competitive industrial environment is encouraging these companies to redesign their manufacturing practices. Lean manufacturing (LM) has been widely implemented in several industries and has been shown to have had a positive impact on the performance and development of companies. This review aims to examine this impact on the performance of manufacturing companies, to emphasize the recent progress of LM amongst SMEs worldwide, and to show that most successful LM initiatives are those implemented in SMEs and large companies. However, very small businesses (VSBs) are struggling to introduce LM into their management systems. A new approach has been developed to establish a new lean implementation framework that could be adapted to the specific context of VSBs.

Keywords

• benefits
• lean implementation
• lean manufacturing
• smes
• very small businesses