Strategic Implementation of Continuous Improvement Approach

Both “KAIZEN” and “KAIZEN” are used in the text. Please check whether any changes should be made for consistency.

In today’s highly dynamic and rapidly changing environment, the global competition among organizations has led to higher demands on the manufacturing organizations. The manufacturing industry has experienced an unprecedented degree of change in the last three decades, involving drastic changes in management approaches, product and process technologies, customer expectations, supplier attitudes, as well as competitive behavior. These challenges are forcing the manufacturing organizations globally to foster high reliability, availability, and maintainability in the manufacturing systems by implementation of various strategic and proactive market-driven strategies to remain competitive in a highly dynamic environment (Ahuja & Khamba, 2008). With increased competition, attention has been focused on improving efficiency of manufacturing operations to meeting market conditions in terms of delivery, cost, and quality (Yamashina, 1995). To meet the continuously changing environment, satisfy customer, and retain market share, incremental improvements of manufacturing system processes have become necessary (Shingeo, 1988). It includes collection of activities aiming at simplifying production processes through elimination of different types of waste (Terziovski, 2002). It is based on making incremental innovation supported by different types of practices (Malik, Li-bin, YeZhuang, & Xiao-lin, 2007). Companies are therefore applying continuous improvement practices to enhance their systems and operations.

This chapter deals with the design of the study, which includes different phases of research work. The details of the work done in each phase along with the tools, techniques, and models used have been explained.

This chapter presents a detailed survey conducted in various organizations in the northern part of India. The objective of the survey is to determine the present status of continuous improvement strategies in the Indian manufacturing industry, to assess the important barriers that affect the implementation of CI strategies, and to assess the role of key enablers leading to improve the performance of manufacturing operations for strategic success.

This chapter presents the case studies conducted at the following organizations: M/S Highway Industries Ltd., Ludhiana, and M/S Farm Parts Limited, Ludhiana, to analyze those areas and aspects, which have been reflected in the survey part.

In this chapter two-phase methodology using AHP and VIKOR has been applied to rank the different strategies of CI approach as per questionnaire as filled by five respondents. It is an attempt to access importance level of CI strategic implementation in an organizational system to provide a framework in the selection of competitive advantages under uncertainty for strategic success. In the present study, three-level hierarchy model has been used to find out its measure of success possibility for CI strategic implementation as shown in Fig. 6.1.

The research has led to some significant revelation about various facets of improving performance of SMEs in Northern India. The following conclusions are drawn from this study: