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Demanding and highly competitive business environment has stimulated small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to restructure their manufacturing practices. Lean manufacturing (LM), a comprehensive alternative, is now being adopted, notably by manufacturing organizations, to increase business effectiveness and performance through a variety of lean approaches. Lean implementation, however, ran into a number of difficulties, which showed that non-technical factors such as human-related practices must also be integrated if lean is to be successful. This study aims to examine a thorough overview of the various human-related lean practices (HRLP) mentioned in recent literature and to determine which of them is more pertinent to a successful LM implementation in SMEs.

A total of 193 publications published in 45 journals between 2013 and 2023 and based on the 4 reputable publishers, namely, Science Direct, Emerald Online, Taylor and Francis and Springer Link, were gathered based on a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed journal articles in LM.

The amount of research on human resource management and lean management that has been conducted has increased dramatically during the past few years. The outcome of this study will offer a thorough analysis of soft lean practices found in the LM literature that manufacturing SMEs should take into account while implementing lean.

The scope of this research is restricted to a survey of scholarly works using the terms “Lean manufacturing” or “Lean production” as well as “human” or “people” or “soft-lean practices” in the title. Furthermore, only works published in scholarly publications that have undergone peer review were included. Also, due to the authors’ linguistic restrictions, only English articles were used. The HRLP linked to a smooth lean transition are described in this research. Thus, it can be used to assist the production and human resource departments in raising an organization’s long-term performance.

The study gives researchers a better grasp of the direction the subject is taking and what gaps still exist, which aids them in focusing their research on HRLP in small- and medium-sized businesses.

This study aims to investigate the implementation of lean human resource management (HRM) practices in manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and explore how various factors interact to influence their successful adoption. By exploring the interplay among these factors, the research seeks to identify key drivers affecting the adoption of lean HRM in manufacturing SMEs. Ultimately, the research intends to provide insights that can guide organisations, practitioners and policymakers in effectively implementing lean HRM practices to enhance operational efficiency, workforce engagement and competitiveness within the manufacturing SME sector.

The study combined total interpretive structural modelling (TISM) and Matrice d'Impacts Croisés Multiplication Appliquée à un Classement (MICMAC) analysis. TISM helped in understanding the hierarchical relationship among different factors influencing lean HRM implementation, whereas MICMAC analysis provided insights into the level of influence and dependence of each factor on others.

The research revealed that “top management support” emerged as the most independent factor, indicating that strong support from top management is crucial for initiating and sustaining lean HRM practices in manufacturing SMEs. On the other hand, “employee involvement and empowerment” was identified as the most dependent factor, suggesting that fostering a culture of employee engagement and empowerment greatly relies on the successful implementation of lean HRM practices.

While the study provided valuable insights, it has certain limitations. The research was conducted within the specific context of manufacturing SMEs, which might limit the generalizability of the findings to other industries. Expert opinions introduce subjectivity in data collection. Additionally, the study may not cover all critical factors, allowing room for further exploration in future research.

The findings have practical implications for manufacturing SMEs aiming to implement lean HRM practices. Recognising the pivotal role of top management support, organisations should invest in cultivating a strong leadership commitment to lean HRM initiatives. Furthermore, enhancing employee involvement and empowerment can lead to better adoption of lean HRM practices, resulting in improved operational efficiency and overall competitiveness.

This research contributes to the field by offering a comprehensive exploration of the interplay among factors influencing lean HRM implementation. The use of TISM and MICMAC analysis provides a unique perspective on the relationship dynamics between these factors, allowing for a nuanced understanding of their roles in the adoption of lean HRM practices in manufacturing SMEs. The identification of “top management support” as the most independent and “employee involvement and empowerment” as the most dependent factors adds original insights to the existing literature.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that promote the successful adoption of lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America.

Based on the results obtained from using structural equation modeling to analyze the collected data, the authors argue that manufacturing organizations need to identify the factors that assist in successfully adopting lean practices in manufacturing firms operating in developing economies in South America. A dataset of 1,809 responses, gathered from manufacturing firms as part of the World Management Survey, was used to find support for the proposed hypotheses.

Several hypotheses were tested finding that lean practice success factors such as organizational targets proved to have a significant and positive relationship with the mediating factor, performance management. Likewise, performance management was also found to have a significant and positive relationship with lean practices adoption. Human capital management (HCM) has a significant but negative predictive relationship with lean practices.

The empirical results of this study provide valuable managerial insights. The results are therefore limited to the economies analyzed and to the variables surveyed as part of the World Manufacturing Survey research.

The results of this research provide a starting point for researchers to continue studying the key lean practice factors and relationships in the achievement of improved performance management, thereby helping managers in developing strategies to improve the lean capabilities of their practices. This, in turn, will increase the organization's competitive advantage sustainably.

This paper identifies and tests the impact of key factors on successful lean practices adoption in South American organizations in the manufacturing sector.

Although lean popularity is rapidly growing, its implementation is far from problem-free and companies may experience difficulties in sustaining long-term success. On this premises, the purpose of this paper is to understand to what extent human factors, affected by the implementation of both hard (defined as technical and analytical tools) and soft (concerning people and relations) lean practices, play a key role in achieving long-term superior performance.

The analysis of the relationships between lean practices implementation, human factors and operational performance is carried out in a single exploratory case study. A retrospective approach is adopted to trace the changes of human and operational performance before, during and after the introduction of lean management (LM) implementation. In particular, a mixed method concurrent design merging results of a qualitative analysis with data collected from a survey is selected to provide a more realistic benefit in the exploration of the proposed research questions.

The results show a short-term direct relationship between the implementation of lean practices (hard and soft) and physical work environment and job characteristics, directly connected to operational outcome. In the long term, operational performance is influenced by employee behaviour outcome and conditioned by physical work environment and job characteristics with the mediating effect of individual characteristics.

The proposed model supports the building of a roadmap for LM implementation, taking into account the role of the human factors to achieve superior operational performance. Moreover, it helps managers to implement a monitoring system to check how social and technical components of a LM system evolve over time. Finally, it supports the definition of specific training programs, tailored for specific workers’ types.

This paper extends theory in LM, highlighting how hard and soft lean practices have to interact to enable a successful LM implementation.

The current research aims to map and investigate how human resource management and lean practices can be integrated. This investigation will help identify the HRM aspects critical in the success of lean initiatives while exploring the research gaps in the existing literature. The review also aims to delineate the benefits and challenges of integrating lean with HRM systems to discuss further research and practice areas.

This study utilizes a systematic literature review method to identify and synthesize the existing literature. As part of the process, a protocol that provided a plan for the review was followed, including the research questions and the data to be extracted.

The study results indicate that aspects of HRM practice and policies such as training and development, teamwork, motivation, communication, leadership, are key enablers of lean initiative deployment and success. The benefits of the integration of human resources with lean can help in lean training and development, communication of lean initiatives and successes, allocating and hiring continuous improvement personnel, and supporting leadership in lean deployment. Challenges to integrating lean and HRM practices included lack of integration and collaboration between disciplines. Further exploration areas in successful lean deployment would be practical longitudinal case studies on lean deployments with human resource (HR) partnerships and involvement.

This review paper has crucial implications for practice relating to, integration of lean with HRM structures and tailoring HRM initiatives to ensure the success of lean deployment and reduce risks of failure.

The systematic literature review study conducted in this paper is the first of its kind to integrate and map the HRM concepts that can be integrated with Lean to deploy the initiative successfully. This mapping is critical for ensuring the success of lean methodologies within an organization and paves the way for future research. In addition, managers and organizations can find support and guidance from this study to focus on vital areas of partnership between their lean and HR programs.

This study aims to explore the interrelationships among human-related lean practices, lean production shop floors, process quality, inventory management, operational productivity and business productivity.

This study used a cross-sectional survey approach, and quantitative data were collected from 324 Indian auto-component manufacturing firms. Confirmatory factor analysis was used, followed by structural equation modelling techniques for the conceptual model, which incorporated a complete set of 11 hypotheses.

The results confirmed that human-related lean practices trigger lean production shop floors and improve process quality. Furthermore, the study revealed the positive impact of a lean production shop floor on process quality and inventory management and the positive impact of process quality on both operational and business productivity. Finally, inventory management is of the utmost importance in achieving better operational and business productivity, and operational productivity positively leads to business productivity.

The findings of this study can benefit auto-component manufacturing firms by elucidating the complex relationships between human-related lean practices, lean production shop floors, process quality, inventory management, operational productivity and business productivity. Better knowledge of these relationships will enable firms to enhance efficiency levels, reduce costs and resource wastage and improve their overall performance. This study provides a good understanding of the interplay between lean and quality factors and their influence on inventory management and business performance.

The notion of achieving competitive advantage using a strategic customer service orientation (SCSO) has received increased research attention. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concept of SCSO in the context of rapidly changing competitive market environments. An organization-wide SCSO can be implemented through lean manufacturing practices to achieve favorable operational and business performances (BPs).

This study employs survey methodology to examine a research model that theorizes eight hypotheses with respect to the relationships among SCSO, human and technical lean practices, and performance outcomes (operational and BPs). Data from 571 firms participating in the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) IV are analyzed using structural equation modeling (AMOS 20).

The findings suggest that firms with a SCSO implement both human and technical aspects of lean manufacturing practices leading to better performance results. The findings also indicate that performance outcomes are indirectly influenced through the combined efforts of technical and human lean manufacturing practices.

Generalizations here are limited to manufacturing firms. SCSO beyond manufacturing firms like healthcare or high-tech organizations that implement lean practices in response to a SCSO have yet to be examined and provide fertile opportunities for future research.

These findings suggest practical insight into how to integrate service-driven value creation and delivery for achieving both cost effectiveness and quality performance outcomes.

The examination of the consequences of SCSO in manufacturing firms from multiple countries is a novel contribution in the field, as is the examination of technical and human lean practices. It comes at a time when manufacturing firms increasingly recognize the value of services for global competitiveness.

Due to the increasing trend of global competitiveness, lean manufacturing has received much attention in the international literature. Although previous studies have indicated the positive effects of lean manufacturing on the performance of the manufacturing firms, the impact of lean practices on two aspects of “job”, namely, characteristics and satisfaction, as of yet remains unclear. As a result, this study aims to evaluate job characteristics to understand the effects of lean manufacturing on job satisfaction.

Data from a survey of 206 employees in lean manufacturing companies were gathered and analysed using the partial least squares technique.

The results indicate that customer relationship, human resources and product design practices had positive indirect effects on job satisfaction through job characteristics, whereas, process and equipment practices had a negative indirect effect.

The findings of the study will be useful for the companies that implement lean manufacturing practices. Companies could either adjust their lean initiatives or make a trade-off amongst job characteristics.

This study contributes to the advancement of knowledge on the effects of lean manufacturing practices on job satisfaction through job characteristics.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of lean operations practice and design on the Chinese manufacturing performance, using lean assessment data from 65 plants in various industries.

Exploratory factor and regression analyses are used to examine the associations among operations practice, production design, and operations performance. Three constructs are developed, two for operations practice (human resources and supply chains) and one for production design.

Factor analysis shows that three factors are sufficient to represent the lean performance dimensions of flow, flexibility, and quality. Regression analysis shows that the lean performance factors are strongly related to operations practice and production system design. Using lean factors and operations practice/design, our results indicate significant gaps in lean manufacturing practices among different industries, with the petroleum and hi‐tech industries performing relatively best. In addition, the garment industry performs very well in flexibility, indicating it does not compete just on price, but also on rapid response. Finally, all industries perform well in quality, underlining the emerging economy character of China. These results support other recent findings of the positive impact of lean operations on the performance of the Chinese manufacturing sector.

The paper's findings, which are based on the experience of selected manufacturing plants in China, should not be interpreted as indicative of the characteristics of the Chinese manufacturing plants in general.

This paper advances the evidence on the role of lean manufacturing in two ways. First, to derive more robust statistical results, the paper relies on primary lean assessment data, as opposed to secondary opinion survey data common to most other studies. Second, to obtain more general findings, the paper makes use of a wider set of relevant variables, both for assessing manufacturing practice and performance, than is usual in the literature.

Lean manufacturing (LM) constitutes a consolidated alternative that has been successfully used to increase company effectiveness and performance. However, different studies have shown that many companies that attempt to integrate LM into their manufacturing operations fail in their efforts. Recent studies have shown that soft practices are a key factor for a successful LM implementation. The purpose of this paper is to analyze an in-depth review of the different human-related lean practices (HRLP) referenced in the recent literature and to identify which of them are more relevant to a successful LM implementation.

The findings presented in this paper are based on the results of a study about the situation of LM in Spain carried out with lean production managers and frontline supervisors of 202 Spanish companies with a high percent (74 percent) of international firms with factories in different countries. The implemented methodology uses factor analysis and structural equation modeling.

The results shows statistical evidence of the relationship between management’s HRLP (fostering a lean culture, providing support to lean), employees’ HRLP (employee involvement and employee empowerment) and operational performance (OP) (waste reduction and flexibility).

The results have academic and practical relevance for clarifying lean phenomena, helping managers to define a sequence in which a company should implement HRLP to successfully implement LM and increase its OP.

This study fills a research gap by exploring the existing causal relationships between a greater number of variables, both dependent and independent in relation to human factors in LM implementations.