Pathways of lean manufacturing in wood and furniture industries: a bibliometric and systematic review

As wood and furniture industries have little knowledge of the implementation of lean manufacturing particularly in emerging economies, the purpose of this study is to analytically and systematically review the literature in this context. To this end, a multi-method approach was implemented in two ways. Firstly, a bibliometric method was performed to analyse the scientific literature and examine all general papers on lean manufacturing in the Scopus database—2879 articles published in leading journals from 1991 to 2019 were accordingly identified and analysed. Secondly, a methodological approach was employed to systematically review all papers focusing on the topic of lean manufacturing in the wood and furniture industries. After fine-tuning, 36 articles were considered to classify the research findings into three sections: (1) growth of research interest, (2) motives and application of lean practices, and (3) lean implementation status, organizational context, barriers, and challenges. The findings revealed that lean has gradually evolved over the years, but not for the wood and furniture industries. The vast amount of scholarly studies has contributed to successful lean implementation in developed countries. Moreover, the existing literature on lean in the context of wood and furniture industries have insufficient evidence levels, and their findings have not yet been widely accepted. Interestingly, the first publication on lean implementation in the wood and furniture industries was recorded in 2003, accordingly revealing that the lean concept is new for practitioners. The present study offers a valuable insight into the development of a lean implementation framework specifically for the wood and furniture industries and is the first attempt to examining the industry-level variable which can lead to new theoretical insight.