Researches on lean manufacturing: views from six perspectives

During the past three decades, manufacturers have been adopting lean manufacturing (LM) to face competition. The implementation of LM paradigm has been widespread and successful in the world. However, in the recent years, few researchers have begun to claim that the implementation of LM paradigm has not been yielding the expected benefits in certain sectors. In the context of making this observation, the literature review reported in this paper was carried out. This literature review was carried out from six perspectives. On viewing from these perspectives, the trends of researches on applying LM in manufacturing and small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) was studied. The trends of LM research thus captured from the literature arena have been presented in eleven sections of this paper. In the last section, the paper is concluded by suggesting the researchers to conduct lean implementation studies in SMEs and develop frameworks to this effect.