The disintegration of lean manufacturing and lean management

Richard J. Schonberger

Business Horizons, 2019, vol. 62, issue 3, 359-371

Abstract: Lean management—in manufacturing, supply chains, healthcare, services—has lost its way. Telling evidence of lean’s dissolution shows up for inventory-intensive organizations in the form of worsening inventory numbers. My research of financial records of more than 1,500 global companies over 15 years shows growing inventories since the turn of the 21st century. Reduction of inventory is a concrete and visual marker of leanness and quicker customer response, while inventory growth is one of the more salient factors that degrades financial health. As to what has gone wrong with lean, the answer is nearly everything: ambiguous terms and concepts, trivializing the essence, botching the basics, going through the motions, analysis paralysis, puffery masking action, abetting organizational silos, discontinuity, and losing interest. This article addresses these in more specific terms with reference to key outcome measures, especially those most customer-relevant.

Keywords: Lean management; Business process improvement; Lean methodology; Just-in-time production (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681319300047
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:62:y:2019:i:3:p:359-371

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2019.01.004

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().