Adaptive Configuration of a Lean Production System in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are facing everyday the hard competition of global markets and higher requirements of the customers. For coping with these changing conditions many large enterprises implement a Lean Production System (LPS). An LPS offers a holistic strategy to eliminate waste in processes, to achieve high product and process quality, and to reduce lead times. The structure of an LPS is described by hierarchical connections of different elements and is configured in four levels: the goals, the sub-goals, the methods, and tools (Dombrowski et al. ZWF Zeitschrift für wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb 101:113–118, 2006). While large enterprises are able to provide necessary resources and experts’ know-how to configure and implement an LPS, SMEs lack these essential resources for organizational, technological, and workforce-related changes. Due to the complexity of the structure of an LPS, SMEs have in practice a small opportunity to configure a suitable structure and often fail in selecting and evaluating the most adequate methods and tools to be used. In this regard, the paper presents a framework to support an adaptive configuration of an LPS in SMEs which has been partly developed in the research project ProfiL in close cooperation with six SMEs.