Comparative Study of Lean Manufacturing Tools Used in Manufacturing Firms and Service Sector

Lean is an optimized manufacturing approach that aims to streamline the flow within an organization. Lean manufacturing caught the eye of the world due to Toyota's steady growth from a small company to one of the biggest automobile manufacturer in the world. After the success story that was TPS, many other car manufacturers started implementing tools used by Toyota into their systems. Today lean is not solely limited to the manufacturing industry, companies in the service sector are increasingly adopting and modifying lean strategies and practices to suit the needs of the service sector and thus streamlining their processes. The primary topic of interest in this paper is to study and compare the lean tools used in the manufacturing and service sectors and to come to a conclusion regarding trends in the lean tools adopted. A comparative study was undertaken between the lean tools in manufacturing firms and the service sector. Data obtained from 180 manufacturing firms and 108 healthcare facilities. The lean tools used were found to be TQM, JIT, kaizen, six sigma, SPC, TPM, kanban, job reengineering, work teams, benchmarking, organizational restructuring and business process reengineering.