Insightful implementation of lean is necessary for high-value manufacturing and is complementary to strategic decision making regarding manufacture. However lean can be difficult to implement in specific organisations. One of the difficulties is deciding which of the many lean tools to apply and when to apply them. A complicating factor is change management. Lean implementation is a transformational process and needs to support organisational development alongside process improvement. We develop a method based on risk management to identify which lean tools are most appropriate for a specific organisational setting. This permits the situational and contingency variables to be accommodated in the lean transformation. The method is demonstrated by application to a small manufacturing organisation with a high-variety low-volume business model. Thus it is possible, given contextual knowledge of the organisation, to predict which lean methods are most important in the situation. This enables the prioritisation of organisational effort towards lean methods that are relevant to the organisation at that particular time in its development. 1. Introduction Lean is considered an essential attribute of a successful manufacturing endeavour [1]. The underlying principle of minimisation of waste for maximisation of productivity has become profoundly influential since being developed into the lean construct [2–4]. As lean has matured, it has been applied ever wider [5, 6]. This includes industries other than manufacturing and into manufacturing industries that were not natural early adopters. It is this latter category that is the focus of the present paper. There is no doubt about the general relevance of lean principles. However the implementation in specific organisations is not straightforward and is not always successful. Sometimes this is because the principles were sound but the implementation failed [7–9], that is, a change management problem. But in the more general case, removing change management issues from consideration, there is still the difficulty of deciding which of the many lean tools to apply in the situation. This is important because lean includes many methods, and the relevance thereof is situationally specific. Implementing lean therefore requires some specific decisions, and the outcome has an element of risk: the implementation could succeed or fail. Unfortunately there are no specific tools for the selection and prioritisation of methods during implementation. This paper explores the implementation of lean, with a particular focus on the
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