Analyzing Influential Factors of Lean Management

The study explores the key factors influencing Lean management and evaluates their individual weights to identify what leads to a successful hospital management. It adopts the 4P Excellence Model in Lean management to assess and measure the healthcare organizations from the five perspectives: leadership, people, partnership, processes, and products. To explore the potential factors, the study employs the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and multi-expert judgment to prioritize the significance of each factor. The study has led to a number of useful insights. Processes are crucial when hospitals advocate lean management. Among the 18 sub-factors in the five criteria, the most significant factors include patient-centered care, clearly defined work content, rewarding teamwork effort, continual learning and upgrading, and increasing the clinic quality. To satisfactorily carry out Lean management, a hospital should continuously strive for improvement, pursue perfection, engender organizational culture, strengthen teamwork, and create mutual trust among team members. Moreover, patient-centered care beliefs should be actively implemented. To provide seamless care, patients and their families should be the main foci. The results could be used by hospital managers to improve their skills and knowledge when implementing Lean management. In addition, the framework developed herein could potentially lend itself to many practical applications.