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The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate an effective project management practice focusing on planning and control. By doing so, it contributes to the debate on rethinking traditional project management practices and accentuates the need for adjustments based on the project context.

This paper extends the project management theory by proposing a lean project planning (LPP) and control framework, developed and tested in collaboration with ten engineer-to-order (ETO) companies. By following a design science research approach, elements from lean thinking and current project planning and control practices are combined into a maturity model (MM).

ETO project characteristics are identified, and their implications for planning and control are discussed. Nine enablers that transform current project planning and control approaches into a lean approach are defined, allowing the analysis of the underlying complexity of planning and controlling ETO projects and thus facilitating the determination of the actions required to improve project performance.

Once fully embedded in an organization, the presented MM can provide a safe framework for self-criticism and can be used to conduct self-assessments without the need for an external facilitator. Thus, this paper is of particular interest to practicing project managers who aim to implement LPP and control.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this paper is the first to empirically examine the journey toward LPP and control from a MM perspective. This research attempts to describe the enablers of LPP and control.

Cutting fluids despite playing an important role in metal cutting have considerable environmental impact. Inert gaseous metal cutting environments were investigated with the aim of removing soluble oil cutting fluids from metal cutting operations.Design/methodology/approach – Industrially reproducible cutting tests were devised, where an austenitic stainless steel and En32 low carbon steel material was milled in a range of different cutting environments. Tool life was measured for tests carried out in a number of gaseous environments and results were then compared with test results from conventional flood cutting environments.Findings – Low oxygen gaseous environments were compared with conventional cutting environments and a considerable flank wear reduction has been recorded using CVD coated tooling. Additionally flood coolant environments have been seen to promote chemical wear after the initial breakdown of coatings leading to rapid flank wear during milling of both En32 and austenitic stainless steel.Research limitations/implications – Only a limited number of work/tool material combinations have been investigated. A more detailed and exhaustive investigation is required to ascertain the scope of the improvements for a range of tool work combinations. This will assist in understanding the underlying reasoning for the tool life enhancement reported.Practical implications – All experimentation carried out is industrially reproducible. This work, therefore, proposes an environmentally clean alternative to the use of emulsified oils in metal cutting operations in order to exploit cost savings and improved operator working environments.Originality/value – Distinct operational performance improvements have been demonstrated in the form of extended tool life for metal cutting operations performed in a non‐polluting cutting environment. These findings could herald widespread advantages within the metal cutting community.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a lean, agile, resilient, and green (LARG) index as a benchmarking tool to assess the leanness, agility, resilience and the greenness of the automotive companies and corresponding supply chain (SC).

The proposed index incorporates LARG supply chain management paradigms and corresponding practices being both weighted according to their importance for the automotive SC sustainability. The Delphi technique is used to obtain the weights for each SC paradigm and a linear aggregated method is proposed. A case study approach related to the automotive SC is chosen to illustrate the LARG index application.

The case study results confirmed the usefulness and ease of application of LARG index in a real world SC. The application of the suggested index to a set of companies, and consequently to their SC, makes possible to identify: the better and worst performer company in each paradigm, the LARG practices with higher levels of application among the companies, the LARG index for each company and also for the corresponding SC. This becomes an important benchmarking tool since comparative analysis regarding the LARG behaviours are possible to perform with the suggested index.

More LARG practices could be considered to improve the robustness of the index. Future studies should be conducted across more companies for improving the effectiveness of the approach, and more members should be included in the panel of Delphi technique for enhancing the validity of the suggested approach.

SC companies will be able to assess their performance in terms of leanness, agility, resilience and greenness. A study like this could encourage all automotive companies to benchmark their organizations as regards their competitors, the best in class, and also the industry average.

This paper contributes to the literature by introducing a new index for measuring the leanness, agility, resilience and greenness of companies and SCs. This index can be used by managers as a benchmarking tool to identify their LARG behaviour and compare it with their SC partners and seek for improvement.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the relationship between the behavioral orientation of leaders from different hierarchical levels and the implementation phase of the lean manufacturing (LM) roadmap. In addition, it also aims at analyzing the influence of inherent contextual variables related to leadership.

The proposed method relies on both qualitative and quantitative approaches, since it combines and numerically assesses the results of semi-structured interviews with lean experts, in addition to evaluating a cross-sectional survey with 225 leaders from different Brazilian companies that are undergoing LM implementation.

The findings support the existence of a transient leadership style along the LM implementation, which is evidenced in terms of task and relation orientation and may vary according to the hierarchical level. Furthermore, the context does matter with regard to leadership style orientation along the LM roadmap phases, although not all variables matter to the same extent.

LM implementation is about changing both technical and socio-cultural aspects, which can be seen as the essence of leadership. The relevant question that arises is whether leaders’ behaviors from different hierarchical levels should be adapted according to the maturity of LM implementation and the contextual variables that surround leadership.

With the current global downturn, companies must develop new and innovative approaches to ensure that economic sustainability is achieved. The purpose of this paper is to propose a Fit Manufacturing Framework (FMF), the adoption of which can help manufacturing companies to become economically sustainable and operate effectively in a global competitive market. This contribution extends the previous work by the authors and provides an evolution on the initial work through enhancing the development of Fit manufacture through developing a more robust framework and a more comprehensive functional testing of the framework.

The proposed FMF provides a new manufacturing management perspective and a new manufacturing management strategy for creating economically sustainable manufacturing organisations. It builds upon the principles of existing manufacturing paradigms, along with innovative management concepts, to set up the conditions necessary for sustainability. A pilot application of the framework in three SMEs shows positive initial results when assessed against four Measures of Performance.

Manufacturing strategies such as Lean and Agility allow companies to deliver bottom‐line savings in production terms, although their effectiveness depends upon the volume and demand profile of their products. The trend towards mass customisation requires companies to provide personalised products and services at mass production prices. This now places a further burden on companies and therefore a holistic manufacturing framework must be developed in order to ensure that the factory of the future is able to meet this new demand. This paper proposes a Fit manufacturing paradigm which integrates the manufacturing efficiencies achieved through Lean and Agility with the need to break into new markets through effective marketing and product innovation strategies to achieve long term economic sustainability. The small‐scale application of the approach in a case company shows the initial results to be positive when measured against key MOPs developed within this paper.

The development of a Fit paradigm aimed at tackling directly the issues of economic sustainability is proposed and is considered by the authors as one of a kind. Fit will also provide a framework for the implementation of sustainable manufacturing operations within organisations.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a methodology that can help small and medium enterprises (SMEs), in the manufacturing sector, to select an appropriate lean tool for the company which will maximum benefits from adopting the tool.

This study focuses on the selection of an appropriate lean tool for manufacturing SMEs. The methodology contains a quantitative approach that can assist SMEs in identifying the appropriate lean tool. A literature review, collation of experts’ opinions via a questionnaire and a case study (to provide a guideline as to how the developed methodology may work) are presented in this research.

The findings revealed that the proposed methodology was effective in identifying the appropriate lean tools for companies, according to the key performance indicators in the manufacturing SME sector.

The developed methodology can be used by manufacturing SMEs as a decision support system to enable the representatives of the company to make an informed decision regarding the selection of the most appropriate lean tool (i.e. that will address the most important issue that the company is experiencing). The strength of using this methodology is that appropriate lean tool can be ascertained relatively easily and inexpensively. There is the prospect of this methodology being applicable to most types of SMEs.

This methodology has proven to be useful for recommending the application of lean tools in a company’s attempt to become lean, bridging the gap identified in the literature review.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between 5S use, contextual factors and performance. The contextual factors comprise structural features of the firm, environment, human resources and technology and quality management. The performance measures refer to improvements in productivity, quality, employee satisfaction, lead time and new product design.

A questionnaire survey was conducted in 203 Spanish manufacturing plants, with personnel interviewees. The hypotheses proposed were verified using correlation analysis and analysis of variance.

The results show the existence of a positive relationship between the use of 5S and some contextual factors such as size, the integration of the plant in a multinational group, the type of product manufactured, the technology used and the quality programmes in the plant. Moreover, 5S is positively related to some operational performance measures, especially those referring to quality and productivity.

This paper contributes to the scarce empirical literature analysing the factors related to the use of 5S and its association with manufacturing performance.

Over the last decade, some Mexican public organisations have begun to enter into a dynamic in which issues such as service quality, ongoing improvement, and internal and external customer orientation are becoming essential to their day‐to‐day management. The purpose of this paper is to present a successful example of how Lean‐Kaizen is implemented in the human resource service process of a Mexican public service organisation.

The research method adopted is the case study. Research is carried out in a Mexican public service organisation, and adopts a retrospective focus. Four methods are used to gather data: direct observation; participative observation; documentary analysis; and semi‐structured interviews.

The Lean‐Kaizen approach helps this public service organisation to improve cycle times in the human resource selection and hiring process. Various enablers and inhibitors are also identified during implementation.

Research is based on a single case study. However, rather than seeking empirical generalisation, it tries to examine how the Lean‐Kaizen approach can be successfully implemented in a service process.

The research is effectively a guide for practitioners (public managers) wishing to apply or already applying Lean‐Kaizen in their service processes.

A review of academic and practitioner literature on the subject indicated that implementation of the Lean‐Kaizen approach has hardly begun to be explored. It is also significant that in Mexico and Latin America, examples of the transfer and implementation of this kind of approach are practically non‐existent in academic literature on the subject.

Lean manufacturing is one of the leading paradigms for fast and proficient manufacturing but its proper implementation is a foremost task due to certain barriers affecting lean and can be handled when utilized with RFID technology. With this aspect in view, the purpose of this paper is to enlighten and present a thorough literature study that can show how RFID-based lean manufacturing is helpful for handling barriers affecting lean manufacturing in light of previous literature available.

In order to achieve this purpose a systematic literature review is conducted to justify the impacts of RFID technology for handling barriers. The aim of this systematic literature review is to initially find the barriers affecting lean implementation and then to explain the properties of RFID-based lean manufacturing which are highly feasible to handle detected barriers.

An interrelation is generated in this study which provides a clear indication that the properties of RFID carry significant effects to handle detected barriers in the operational, managerial and financial regime of manufacturing companies. The detected barriers that affect lean implementation are company’s cultures, top management commitment, poor employee administration, lack of finances, unbalanced inventory control, unstable customer handling and longer lead times. The properties of RFID-based lean manufacturing like operational visibility, inventory control, production control, minimized lead times and the real-time data information (to facilitate top management and employees on shop floor) are extremely helpful to control these barriers.

The originality of this study is the provision of clarity provided to both academicians and practitioners by citing and utilizing previous research studies which undoubtedly indicates positive impacts of RFID on lean implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate as well as select various significant demand pull (DP) strategies affecting sustainable development (SD) in manufacturing organizations. The study deploys the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique to empirically validate the interrelationships between significant DP strategies and SD indicators in an SEM-DP Model.

Confirmatory factor analysis approach is applied to generate an effective SEM-DP model using the AMOS 21 (Analysis of Moment Structures) software. The data have been collected from different manufacturing organizations practicing DP strategies, using a well-framed DP questionnaire for the evolution of the SEM-DP model.

SEM of various DP strategies like stringent implementation of government regulations (SIGR), transforming capabilities, unionized labor (UL), and customer attributes (CA) toward achieving SD in manufacturing industries has been performed. The SEM-DP model has been planned and reports obtained before and after modification indices of the model are correlated, which further establishes improvements in the model’s effectiveness. The research concludes that significant DP strategies, namely, SIGR, UL, and CA support the manufacturing industries in accomplishing SD in terms of competitiveness, business performance enhancements, flexibility, customer satisfaction, and technological development.

In the present study, contributions of DP practices are determined to accomplish SD in Indian manufacturing organizations only. Hence, the results obtained may need some modifications before applying to other countries. Moreover, issue-wise independent modeling can also be performed to assess the importance of DP practices under specific orientations.

The results of various interrelationships among DP practices and SD indicators in the SEM-DP model portray the effectiveness of DP practices for achieving organizational goals and social commitments.

The outcomes of the study will help DP practitioners, organizational managers, and HR executives in the manufacturing industries to develop a clear understanding about the significant DP strategies to be followed holistically for accomplishing SD. The manufacturing enterprises will be able to frame and organize their policies, handle their UL issues and CA in a more appropriate way. Hence, the knowledge obtained from present study will help improve the overall performance of manufacturing industries involved in the present context.