Lean manufacturing in organisation

Lean manufacturing originally is part of Toyota production system.  Toyota applied this system quite long time ago since 1940.  The system was developed by Toyoda and T.Ohno.  The objective of  this system is to eliminate all wastes and ensure the production will continuously flow without any interruption.  According to T.Ohno, inventory is considered highly contribute to the waste.  Therefore, the small lot size technique is really good practice to reduce inventory.  What is a lean?  Krafcik has defined  "lean" as  less of resources used in the operation including material, space, cost and etc. Most of the companies implemented LM gained highly return in performance such as productivity, profit, lead time and quality. However, there were also LM companies which failed in their implementation.  The most cited reason the companies failed was due to poor commitment of top management and poor knowledge on LM.  Why do top management not interested in LM implementation?  Do this system will increase their job scope or reduce their authority.

Since this topic is very important to all companies including service sector, I personally recommended to all organisation to look seriously in this system.  There are two important components in LM implementation, strategic and operation.  The strategy component is related to strategy planning on LM implementation including critical success factors.  Three highest CSF discovered for LM implementation were top management commitment, training & education and employee involvement. Whereas the operation component involved with LM practices 5S, Kaizen, Quality circle and etc.  This component is complement to each other, fail to implement one of the element will cause the system brake down.  The emergent of the system has made all sectors such as hospital, construction, aerospace are looking to this system.  Do Malaysian organisation interested  to implement this system?  Please be free to read my paper on a review on lean manufacturing practices in small and medium enterprises (google)