A study on adoption of lean manufacturing practices with special reference to auto components firms in Chennai

Lean manufacturing is a business model and collection of tactical methods that emphasize eliminating non-value added activities (waste) while delivering quality products on time at least cost with greater efficiency. Surveys carried on during the past decade of lean implementation, found that the adoption of lean practices in manufacturing firms in India is very much lagging. Companies give out in implementing lean practices due to selecting wrong tools and implementation sequence. Firms cannot get the entire benefit of lean adoption by implementing lean tools and neglecting other areas of manufacturing that leads to failure in lean implementation. Thus, this work proposes to examine the adoption of lean manufacturing practices in manufacturing industries. Also to understand the obstacles faced by the firms while implementing lean principles, to compare the difference between widespread and limited lean firms based on functional execution, benefits achieved and competitive advantage gained. Multiple choice questions like questionnaires have been chosen to collect the responses from 40 manufacturing firms in Chennai. Descriptive research is used in this study. The simple random sampling method has used in the research work. The information gathered has been analyzed through percentage analysis and several statistical tools like Descriptive statistics, Chi-square test and one way ANOVA.