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Firms have been adopting lean manufacturing to improve their business performances. However, they are facing failures or less success in implementation, mainly due to lack of understanding in relating the lean practices (LPs) from the required performance measures perspective. In view of the lack of research and the importance of understanding them, the purpose of this paper is to prioritize LPs.

As LPs are scattered in the literature and a variety of performance measures are used, an extensive literature review is first carried out to identify the LPs and performance measures. The blend of interpretive structural modeling and interpretive ranking process interpretive tools is adopted in establishing the contextual relationship among LPs and then ranking them based on the performance measures. A three-dimensional priority matrix is proposed for better explanation of the results.

The proposed framework can help firms better understand LPs and their levels of importance in lean implementation.

The involvement of lean experts may produce some bias in evaluating the LPs.

The proposed framework can help practitioners to develop an industry-specific road-map for the result-oriented LP implementation. Based on the area of performance to be improved, practitioners can prioritize LPs for implementation.

This is the first study that provides a comprehensive review of LPs available in the literature and prioritizes them in accordance with performance with interpretive tools.

Companies have been implementing lean manufacturing to improve their business performances. However, many of them have difficulties in the implementation because of various barriers, thus encountering failures. This paper aims to prioritize and analyze the lean barriers for better understanding and interpretation for successful lean implementation.

Extensive literature review has been carried out to identify the lean barriers. Subsequently, total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) has been adopted where lean experts’ inputs have been sought to obtain the self-interaction and reachability matrix. Further, driving power and dependence of lean barriers have been derived, and TISM-based lean barrier model has been developed.

Insufficient management time, insufficient supervisory skills and insufficient senior management skills are the significant barriers with highest driving power and lowest dependence. With low driving power, cost- and funding-related barriers such as cost of the investment, internal funding and external funding are found to be less important barriers.

This model provides a more realistic approach to the problems faced by practitioners during lean implementation. Thus, it provides a roadmap to implement lean by focusing on reducing or eliminating important barriers.

The paper not only provides a TISM-based model of contextual relationships among lean barriers but also describes the validation of this model.