Pär Åhlström

Does a manufacturing company have to concentrate on a few competitive priorities or can it excel at everything it does? The traditional notion of trade-offs between manufacturing capabilities has recently come under question. Based on the manufacturing management practices of certain Japanese companies, or lean production, it has been proposed that manufacturing capabilities are built cumulatively. The sequence of the initiatives with which manufacturing capabilities are built has, however, received less attention. Particularly lacking are studies which take a process view of implementation. A process view implies studying implementation through longitudinal research, as opposed to cross-sectional research. This book addresses this gap in knowledge. The central problem examined in this book is whether there exists any sequences of lean production principles and what the sequences are. For a period of two and a half years, the author participated in and studied the transformation of Office Machines - the fictitious name of a company adopting lean production. Using the clinical methodology, the author gained access to data not normally available for research, which provided a unique opportunity to study the adoption process. The findings from the clinical study groups the principles of lean production into four different categories, depending on when management devoted effort and resources to the principles. Through a comparison with existing operations management theory, the study’s conclusions indicate that there are sequences in which lean production principles are adopted. However, management also need to devote effort and resources to a set of principles simultaneously.