Commonality Amongst Various Lean Manufacturing Techniques : An Investigation in the Indian Automobile Industry

Lean manufacturing techniques are nowadays being utilized by diverse sectors of organizations both in manufacturing as well as service sectors so as to enhance their productivity and make them universally competitive. Interrelationship has been observed amongst the various consequential techniques/tools of lean manufacturing paradigm. It has been established by different researchers that lean manufacturing techniques do have commonality. In this paper, an endeavor has been made to empirically examine the commonality amongst the vital lean manufacturing techniques/tools. It has been observed that lean manufacturing techniques like Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), 5S and Supplier Partnership have paramount commonality among them. Moreover, Quality Management System (QMS), Kaizen and seven wastes (7W) reduction technique do additionally have consequential commonality. Furthermore, few other lean manufacturing techniques have been found to have moderate or low commonality. It is suggested that lean manufacturing techniques need to be implemented holistically for felicitous employment of the lean manufacturing paradigm to get optimum benefits of this approach