Companies should focus on adopting the most suitable initiatives that support in satisfying their customer needs. Lean is considered as one of the most important initiatives that enhance the internal processes; hence, significant results can be achieved. On the other side, it is crucial to sustain such results over time. In order to achieve such sustainability, companies need to identify and strengthen the lean success factors before establishing a lean program. The paper proposed a research methodology with a case study to select and understand the critical success factors for lean manufacturing to support in achieving organization’s operational goals. The proposed work is developed based on managing experts' knowledge by utilizing fuzzy-DEMATEL method. The proposed work was adopted in an Egyptian manufacturing firm from 2015, in one of its factories that is dedicated to produce home refrigerators. Before the identification of lean critical success factors, the company tried to implement lean applications. Positive results were achieved but on the long run, the system restored its initial performance levels. After applying the proposed approach, the results indicates that “Education and training”, “Top management involvement and commitment”, “Leadership”, and “Cultural change” respectively are the most critical success factors for lean manufacturing implementation. Strengthen these factors before consultant participation leads to sustainable achievements. After working on such factors, continual improvement is achieved and remained since 2015. Results indicate that continual improvements still occurred gradually and smoothly also achieved results are sustained. On average there are 60 Kaizen sheet were introduced monthly by kaizen teams, focusing on work in process reduction, increasing quality (first pass yield), reducing assembly lead-time, and eliminating different types of waste. It was reported that the total production rate improved by about %14.5 in 2016. |
