Lean production in SMEs: literature review and reflection on future challenges

Abstract

It is an opportune moment to an extended literature review of lean implementation in SMEs given the recent serious research attention. Therefore, this paper presents an extensive review of more than 100 published papers on lean in SMEs. A classification scheme is then suggested. Accordingly, the reviewed papers were classified first according to their research content to six categories: Literature survey, Impact on performance, Critical Success factors, Implementation Framework, Status of implementation, Measurement. Afterwards, research methodologies employed in previous studies were categorized into conceptual, descriptive, comparative, empirical, exploratory cross‐sectional and exploratory longitudinal approaches. Consequently, various emerging issues in this topic were identified, namely, status of lean implementation in SMEs in developing countries, integration of lean in SMEs with green manufacturing, critical success factors of lean implementation in SMEs, suitability of lean tools for SMEs, framework of implementation of lean in SMEs and measurement system of lean change in SMEs.