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Supply chain management plays a vital role in deciding the final cost of products. A huge number of non-value-added activities are performed throughout supply chain process. Lean principles are useful to identify and eliminate waste activities across the supply chain management processes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the validity and reliability of the existing lean supply chain management (LSCM) frameworks in the Indian manufacturing industry through questionnaire survey methodology.

The present study collected empirical data from 180 top- and middle-level management personnel from the Indian manufacturing industry. Factor analysis was performed to check unidimensionality of LSCM frameworks by using empirical data. Cronbach’s α value of each selected LSCM framework was calculated to find out its reliability. Finally, frequency distribution analysis was performed on the selected framework to identify and reveal critical constructs of LSCM.

It was found that nine LSCM frameworks show unidimensionality. The study established that most of the selected frameworks exposed a high level of reliability. The frequency distribution analysis revealed that the larger part of the constructs had a high mean score and mode. It is concluded that there is a need for a new LSCM framework to fulfill the requirements of the Indian manufacturing industry.

The present study is focused on checking the suitability of existing LSCM frameworks in the Indian manufacturing sector. It is anticipated that the study will be helpful to the professionals who wish to execute appropriate LSCM framework in the manufacturing organization.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of simulation laboratory on continuing education engineering students’ academic performance.

The investigation consists of establishing the student learning levels then mapping the student learning levels (knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation) through program outcomes with appropriate evaluation components. 270 continuing education students enrolled during six years were selected to be observed as part of this study. These students were divided into two subgroups, one with 135 students who were offered simulation lab (G2) and the other 135 students were not offered simulation lab (G1) in this investigation. Subsequently, a comparative analysis was carried out on these two groups to assess the student performance in multiple evaluation components with respect to student learning level and program outcome achievement.

It was identified that student performance in the application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation learning levels has improved for the group with simulation lab, and no change or minimal change was observed for the group without simulation lab. It was revealed that the simulation lab practice problems needs to be aligned with the theoretical concepts in the course to get a better performance from the students.

The study was conducted in one of the leading institutes with 270 students’ performance observed over a period of six years. It is the comprehensive work done on a complete program with data collated over a period of six years in multiple courses and multiple assessments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution of Total Quality Management (TQM) in terms of barriers, customers and accreditation in higher education (HE) over the last three decades (1991–2020) using literature review to establish the current state.

A total of 137 articles across 55 journals were consolidated for this review specifically focused on TQM (barriers, customers and accreditation) in HE. The investigations were carried out to identify the chronological growth of articles, research streams and methodologies. The articles were classified based on four research approaches and three research streams which have been reviewed in detail.

Considering the rapid growth in the HE sector and the concerns over reduction in quality of education especially in developing countries, the importance of TQM in HE is immense. The findings include identification of the barriers to successful TQM implementation, the need for alignment of TQM objectives of higher educational institutions (HEIs) and identified target customer(s) with the selected model/framework and the impact of accreditation/certification in the attainment of TQM.

This study which tries to bring a perspective to the main trends in TQM application to HE with respect to barriers, customers and accreditation over the last three decades is expected to add to the body of knowledge in this area and help future researchers to focus on the relevant areas identified in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate, validity and reliability analysis on existing Lean manufacturing (LM) frameworks when applied to Indian organizations. LM is one of the best manufacturing strategies that are used by manufacturing plant managers to improve manufacturing capabilities.

In the present research work, a questionnaire-based survey was used to examine 35 LM frameworks. The study targeted respondents ranging from top- and middle-level management personnel in Indian manufacturing industry. The sample includes organizations in a variety of industries ranging from automobile, electronics, engineering, process and textile industries products. The survey tool was prepared with team of 12 members i.e. six academicians and six professionals from manufacturing industry environment. The study received 186 responses from various sectors of manufacturing industry, 180 surveys were usable resulting in a response rate of 23.90 per cent. Factor analysis was conducted to check unidimentionality of the framework. Cronbach’s alpha is calculated to find reliability of each framework’s. Lastly, frequency analysis was used to recognize familiar constructs of LM on the chosen framework.

This study has identified that most of the LM frameworks revealed a high level of reliability. When the study has examined further advance about unidimensionality with respect to the construct, i.e. the LM it measures, it confirmed 11 frameworks were revealing unidimensionality. The frequency analysis was evident that a greater part of the constructs has a high mean score and mode. Finally, the research concludes that there is requirement for a novel framework to Indian manufacturing industry to stay in competition with global manufacturing industries.

Cross-sectional data from manufacturing industries and India (only one country) is used with sample size restricted to 180 only, and it would be interesting to test these frameworks for more than one industry sector and country.

The present work tries to find the suitability of the presented LM frameworks to Indian manufacturing industry sector. The authors hoped that the present research would give the information to the management to execute the suitable LM framework in their firm.

The present work tries to find the suitability of the presented LM frameworks to Indian manufacturing industry sector. The authors hoped that the present research would give the information to the management to execute the suitable LM framework in their firm.

Value stream mapping (VSM) is a lean manufacturing (LM) tool used for analyzing material and information flow on a specific product family. The purpose of this article is to address the importance of VSM in LM environment in an Indian auto components industry.

The case study approach has been used to show the applicability and importance of VSM in an Indian auto components company, in which the current state of manufacturing is mapped with the help of VSM symbols. According to the current state mapping, the study conducted analysis and identifies the area of improvement needed in terms of work in process, lead time and cycle time. The study further implemented kaizen on the current state map and developed future state map while including these kaizens.

The study clearly shows that the VSM brings out the positive impact on process ratio, TAKT time, process inventory level, line speed, total lead and process time and reduced man power. It is helping the company in satisfying their customers with respect to quality, cost and delivery.

The main limitation of the study is the confined focus on a single industry. The case should be extended to other industries in order to support the findings and for the purpose of the wider generalization.

The results obtained from the study will help other industries and sectors to implement VSM in LM environment.

The article deals with a real case study, which shows application of VSM for implementing lean principles.

Lean manufacturing (LM) principles are one of the alternatives to improve manufacturing productivity, quality and customer satisfaction in Indian manufacturing industry. The purpose of this paper is to find the implementation status of LM principles across Indian manufacturing organizations through the empirical survey methodology.

The survey questionnaire was developed based upon literature review conducted on LM and also considered experts suggestion in the field of LM. The survey questionnaire was sent to 753 manufacturing organization located in India. The respondent organization details have gathered from the list of Confederation of Indian Industries directory for the year 2011.The selected respondents were production managers, quality managers, sales managers, maintenance managers, CEOs of the organization. The empirical survey collected 180 filled survey questionnaires from Indian manufacturing industries.

The study clearly identified that many manufacturing organizations were in initial transition stage and concentrating mostly in-plant operations instead of collaboration in all levels of business with suppliers and customers. The present study found that drivers for implementation of LM were customer satisfaction and organizational continuous improvement program. The present study also found that barriers to implement LM principles were employee resistance, implementing few elements of LM principles instead of the complete package of LM framework, budget constraints and lack of understanding of LM principles to shop floor managers. Finally the study concluded that Indian manufacturing organizations have to conduct continuous learning programmed to improve understanding of LM principles as well as to maintain their motivation level in apex point. The study also suggested that a systematic LM framework is needs to Indian manufacturing organizations, which will act as clear cut guiding torch to the organization managers to implement LM principles across organization.

The sample size of the present study was moderate number than previous studies. However the study only concentrated on manufacturing organizations across India. The results of the present study cannot generalize across all the sectors of Indian organizations.

The concept of LM was very popular among developed and developing countries in the world. Many research studies were performed across world to find the status of LM implementation in their countries. Very few research studies reported the status of LM implementation in Indian manufacturing industries and those studies also with limited focus of the status of LM implementation. Hence the study presented details status of LM principles implementation in Indian manufacturing industries.

The purpose of this paper is to review the existing literature on empirical research in lean manufacturing (LM). It provides a critical assessment of empirical research methodology of 178 research articles published from 1990 to 2009.

The article reviewed a set of 178 empirical research articles in LM research with respect to empirical research design and its related facets. The 236 empirical research articles which are published in 70 journals during 1990-2009 are collected from four major management science publishers, namely, Emerald Online, Science Direct, Springer Link and Taylor & Francis. In total 178 research articles published in 24 journals are selected for critical review of empirical research methodology in LM. The approach for the critical review of 178 empirical research articles in LM is based on empirical research approach given by Flynn et al. (1990). The critical review discusses the current status of empirical research in LM and future directions.

It is concluded from the analysis of the results that: the number of empirical research articles in LM is increasing at a faster pace than ever before; theory building and theory verification articles are equally advanced; the researchers have also unexplored various aspects of empirical research such as importance of triangulation of data, alternate research designs other than survey and case studies; contextual focus is mostly on the manufacturing industry; more focus required on other aspects of empirical research such as collecting the samples from developing and undeveloped countries, larger sample size, longitudinal data collection methods. Finally, it concludes that there is a need of LM frameworks, which gives the stepwise process to remove all kinds of wastes from any organization.

To the knowledge of the authors, it is the first of its kind attempt to critically review the empirical research articles in LM. The review analysis entirely focussed on descriptive statistics of empirical research in LM. The sample size is one of the unique features of this research as the number of shortlisted articles is 178 in 24 journals published over a time span of 20 years (1990-2009).

The concept of “green product development (GPD)” has been emerged as a global phenomenon. The main objective of GPD is to minimize the impact of industrial growth on the environment across the globe. Many researchers have actively contributed articles for developing GPD, but none of them provide direction and guidance for an effective implementation of GPD in organizations. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify a comprehensive list of the principles, practices, tools and techniques, and integrate them to develop and propose a new framework for GPD for effective implementation in organizations.

The present study has examined 37 frameworks published from 1991 to 2012 in selected 23 peer reviewed journals. The study has also identified pillars of the framework with the help of comparative analysis performed on the selected GPD frameworks. The study has formed a team to identify critical elements in the field of GPD. The team consisted academicians, practitioner and consultant.

The findings of the present paper bring out extremely incoherent utilization of elements for implementing GPD. The study has identified 80 unique elements and 11 pillars to propose a comprehensive conceptual framework in the field of GPD with the help of comparative analysis. Also, the present study analysis of selected research articles founds that future research in GPD should be directed towards finding a coherent set of elements that may be further employed to formulate and execution of frameworks. To achieve the required task, the study has proposed a conceptual comprehensive framework in the field of GPD with the help of extensive literature survey and comparative analysis.

The study has conducted extensive literature survey using various online portals and sources. It has not only performed critical review on existing sample of the frameworks but also raised the issue of what is really a framework and how to identify the frameworks from the literature. The study also provides guidelines to the future researchers to propose new frameworks in the field of GPD.

The purpose of the article is to identify suitable existing lean product development (LPD) framework that is useful to implement in Indian manufacturing industry. The number of successful products is one of the most deciding factors in any organization revenue. Lean principles can be applied across product development processes to eliminate waste activities. Thus, to fulfill the objective, the present study has performed validity and reliability analysis on the existing LPD frameworks with the help of empirical data collected from Indian manufacturing sector through a survey questionnaire methodology.

The empirical data was collected from 180 manufacturing organizations from Indian manufacturing sector. The study has gathered the empirical data from respondents from top and middle level personnel. Factor analysis was conducted on the collected empirical data to find the unidimensionality of the each framework. Reliability of each individual framework was determined through Cronbach’s alpha value. Finally, the frequency distribution analysis was performed to find familiar constructs in the selected frameworks sorted on the basis of validity and reliability analysis.

The present study found that only eight LPD frameworks have displayed unidimensionality with respect to the construct, i.e. the LPD it measures. The study also found that those eight frameworks have displayed a high level of reliability. Further, the study tried to find the most familiar constructs from the selected eight frameworks by applying frequency distribution analysis. The frequency distribution analysis has identified that most of the constructs have showed a high value in terms of mode and mean. The study also concluded that there is a need to develop a new LPD framework, which is suitable to fulfill the requirements of Indian manufacturing industry, as well as global manufacturing industry.

The study collected empirical data from 180 organizations and all of the respondents were restricted from Indian manufacturing industry. Hence, the study believes that there is a chance some more amplification before being generalizes over across the sectors and countries.

The main objective of the present article is to find out the suitability of the existing LPD frameworks to Indian manufacturing sector. The study also anticipates that the products development managers and executives may collect complete information on the existing LPD frameworks and also a chance to executing proper suitable framework in the respective manufacturing organization.

In the highly competitive business landscape, manufacturing firms need to adopt an effective manufacturing strategy to attain a successful world-class manufacturing status. Over the past few decades, the lean manufacturing (LM) approach has gained recognition as one of the foremost strategies for enhancing performance. However, the implementation of LM poses significant challenges due to several barriers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the primary barriers to lean implementation within the apparel industry.

This paper used an exploratory study approach, using a three-part structured questionnaire to assess the level of agreement on different lean barriers. The measurement of these barriers was conducted using a five-point Likert scale. Empirical data were collected from 177 apparel companies located in Bangladesh.

The findings of the research highlight that the primary obstacles to implementing LI include a lack of understanding of the lean manufacturing system (LMS), the manufacturing process, the company culture and resistance from employees.

This paper could potentially limit the generalizability of this research, as it exclusively examines a single manufacturing sector – the apparel industry.

This paper will help practitioners in finding solutions to resolve discrepancies between current manufacturing practices and the LMS.

This paper fulfills an identified need to examine the extent of lean adoption within the apparel industry of Bangladesh.