Leanness Assessment Tools and Frameworks

This chapter presents the most recent developments with regards the assessment of leanness in manufacturing organizations. Leanness is the measure of the performance of lean manufacturing practices. It is tracked for improvement using assessment frameworks. This chapter reviews prevalent frameworks in order to organize the knowledge, extract the typical and potential uses, establish strengths and weaknesses and reveal ways of improving the extant frameworks. Prevailing frameworks are identified through a search of literature, together with those developed by lean consultants, as well as award-based frameworks. Two main classification schemes are used to organize and compare the frameworks namely the leanness indicators (input data type) used in the frameworks and the applications of the frameworks, representing the inputs and outputs respectively of the frameworks. The key findings of this work can be summarized into: First, most frameworks are generated using either a quantitative or qualitative set of leanness indicators; meanwhile there is a paucity of frameworks that use both types of indicators simultaneously to take advantage of their individual strengths and overcome their respective weaknesses. Second, the frameworks have been used mainly for current-as-is audits, whereas the assessment of proposed improvements is rarely considered. Third, majority of frameworks do not emphasize the interactions between lean practices and the trade- offs between their improvements.