A Study on the Lean Manufacturing Systems Practice in Bangladesh and Kaizen Implementation

Abstract

Lean Manufacturing systems have overcome the perception of being another management fantasy. An increasing number of organizations in developing countries are implementing lean production systems in order to generate improvements in performance and remain competitive. At present many manufacturing industries in Bangladesh have chosen to conduct the study. A field survey with semi-structured questionnaires, interviews, and site visits was conducted to gather necessary information from the companies. These companies were selected purposely to ensure the best possible scenario of lean management practice in Bangladesh. The main thrust of this research is to examine the extent of lean practices in the Bangladeshi manufacturing industry to improve manufacturing performance and identify the factors for enabling the environment for practicing lean successfully. This study performs a comparative analysis to explore the association between the results of the present study with other global studies examining similar philosophies. The research findings indicate that the selected companies have adopted a wide variety of lean tools, and techniques and gained many improvements. Findings also different kinds of factors as well as factors that hindered the lean implementation initiatives. It concludes with suggestions for further work.