Development of a framework for implementation of lean manufacturing systems

Researchers worldwide have proposed various frameworks for Lean Manufacturing (LM). A review of these frameworks reveals that many frameworks fall under the category of 'design/conceptual framework' that provides information about 'what constitutes LM' and few under the category of 'implementation framework', which describes 'how to implement LM'. A further comparative analysis of these implementation frameworks reveals that they suffer from shortcomings. In this paper, an attempt has been made to propose a new framework for LM implementation to resolve these shortcomings. The main feature of the proposed framework is that the LM implementation is divided into several levels/stages. At each level, the associated tools/techniques/practices/procedures (referred as elements in short) of LM to be utilised are introduced. The proposed framework is only a conceptual model and needs empirical validation.