The Factors Which Affecting the Company Direction to Implementation of Lean Approach in Industrial Kuwaitis companies

Abstract

Businesses everywhere have given enormous attention to “lean” manage-ment programs for over a decade. However, none emulates what Toyota, the creator of “lean,” has achieved. To be sure, many businesses temporarily improve their performance, some greatly, by adopting Toyota practices. But none succeeds as Toyota has at continuously improving lead time, cost, productivity, quality, and overall financial performance year after year after year, for decades. Failure to reach a desired goal despite repeated attempts often reflects a systemic pattern of problem solving in which people ameliorate symptoms of a problem without removing the problem’s root cause. Because they find relief from its symptoms, if only for a while, businesses postpone looking for the problem’s deeper root causes. The problem persists and continues to produce troubling symptoms that one temporary fix after another merely alleviates, without ever eradicating the core problem. Does this mode of problem solving characterize most “lean” initiatives? If it does, then such initiatives fit the popular definition of insanity: “doing the same thing over and over again while hoping for different results.”