Lean practices and their effect on performance: a literature review

This paper introduces a literature review of 83 studies dealing with the degree of adoption of lean manufacturing practices around the world, and the links between those practices and organisation performance. The results of this study revealed that lean practices application still occurs in a fragmented way, disregarding the systemic linkage that is essential to lean manufacturing. Forty-one articles have suggested a positive effect of lean practices in at least one operational, financial and/or environmental performance metric. Nevertheless, five studies indicated that some lean practices had a negative effect on operational or financial performance. High demand variability, a perceived result of long-term lean manufacturing implementation, a country/company’s organisational culture and the difficulty of traditional costing production systems to measure and compare investments and economic gains from adopting lean manufacturing over time are some of the reasons to explain that negative effect of lean practice on performance.