GENERAL ARTICLES

 

Lean applications: a survey of publications with respect to South African industry

 

 

R.A. Dondofema^{I, #}; S. Matope^{I, *}; G. Akdogan^II

^IDepartment of Industrial Engineering, Stellenbosch University, South Africa
^IIDepartment of Process Engineering, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

 

 

ABSTRACT

South African industry faces immense global competition from developed countries such as Germany probably because of the adoption of lean manufacturing techniques by the latter. This study is a survey on publications concerning implementation and adoption of lean manufacturing in South Africa. To assess South Africa with regards to research publications on lean manufacturing, a benchmark exercise was conducted with Germany for the period 2014 to 2015. The study concludes by highlighting the gaps identified during this survey and recommendations.

OPSOMMING

Die Suid-Afrikaanse industrie staar hewige globale mededinging vanaf ontwikkelde lande soos Duitsland in die gesig, waarskynlik as gevolg van die aanneming van lenige vervaardigingstegnieke deur die laasgenoemde. Hierdie navorsing is 'n beskouing van die publikasies oor die implementering en aanneming van lenige vervaardiging in Suid-Afrika. Om Suid-Afrika te beoordeel aan die hand van navorsingsuitsette met lenige vervaardiging as die onderwerp, is 'n maatstaf oefening uitgevoer met soortgelyke publikasies in Duitsland in die periode van 2014 tot 2015. Die navorsing lig die gapings so geidentifiseer uit en maak aanbevelings hieroor.

 

 

1 INTRODUCTION

The expansion of the South African Mining Industry in 1880s due the discovery of diamonds in Kimberly and gold in Johannesburg [11] created a demand for skills which led to the establishment of local academic and technical institutions. Year 1882 saw the conception of South African Association of Engineers and Architects [13] which was replaced by South Africa Association of Engineers in 1902 [49]. The establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 brought the refinement of the organisation to South African Institution of Engineers. The institution advocated for the enactment of South African Council for Professional Engineers, the act was passed in 1968 as Act 81of 1968 [13]. University of Pretoria was the first to offer graduate course in Industrial Engineering in 1961 and in 1975 the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering was established at the university [18]. Year 1986 brought South African Institute of Production Engineers; and Southern African Institute of Industrial Engineers was formally launched in 1981 [49]. The contribution of Industrial Engineers in modern industry is undisputed; and the success story of Toyota Motor Corporation [31] is a witness to the claim. Toyota philosophy of integrating complex manufacturing systems which consist of people, production equipment, time and money is a distinct referral point in terms of success within the Industrial Engineering discipline. Implementation of lean manufacturing system in United States of America (USA), Japan [20], India [16] and Germany is very popular; and a self-introspect survey is necessary to diagnose South Africa's weaknesses and outline areas of successes. This study is a survey on the publications concerning the application of Lean Manufacturing (successor of Toyota Production Systems) in South African Industry. The aim is to establish the level of implementation and adoption of lean manufacturing in South African industry based on published research. To establish the level of implementation of lean manufacturing in South African industry the following objectives were perused:

a) To determine the trends concerning the research work on lean manufacturing in South African industry

b) To identify the gap in terms of the application of the technique in South Africa

 

2 METHODOLOGY

A literature collection method employed for this survey is described in Section 2.1. Section 3 shows results of the conceptual and empirical aspects of the identified literature. A sub section in Section

3 is dedicated for benchmarking the publications for South African industry against Germany industry. This then revealed the disparities between the two countries and recommendations for South African industry is imbedded in conclusion section.

2.1 Systematic literature review methodology

Systematic literature review methodology is used to gather and analyse a vast amount of research studies and publications concerning a specific subject to answer predefined questions by integrating the empirical evidence from all relevant studies [57]. Multiple publications have been produced concerning the application of lean in manufacturing and service industries and this study seeks to gather and analyse publications focused on the application of lean manufacturing in South African Industry to understand trends in applications of lean manufacturing. This section describes in detail how the review was conducted and a summary of the methodology is shown in Table 1.

2.1.1 Data sources and data collection

To fully understand the demography of lean manufacturing in South African industry the author(s) conducted a systematic literature review on Scopus and Web of Science search engines. To avoid an ad hoc list of publications, the search filters was set on South Africa (Territory), 1970-2015 (Publication Year) and Article and Conference Paper (Document Type). Table 2 shows the search terms and the results yielded from the primary search using article title, abstract and keywords as the search fields.

2.1.2 Data selection

The 638 publications reaped in the primary search were subjected to a rigorous examination to ascertain if the publication perfectly fit for the final review. The initial criteria measure was to check if the publication was in any way related to lean manufacturing. The vetting process was accomplished by checking the relevance of the tittle of the publication with respect to applications of lean manufacturing. In case of any uncertainty of relevance of the tittle, the abstract of the publications was investigated. In this preliminary vetting process 490 publications were eliminated from the sample list. The second evaluation procedure was to check if there were no duplicates across the publications list and 60 duplicates were removed from the list. Another 46 publications were eliminated from the list because they were irrelevant to the scope of the study. The last selection criteria were to check if the geographical focus of the study was South African industry and six publications were eliminated upon this criterion with an additional of four publications removed because they were inaccessible. A final data set of 32 publications was collected and the document progression during the publication selection process is shown in Figure 1.

 

 

2.1.3 Data extraction and analysis

Intensive reading and assignment of specific codes and data categories to publications aspects was individually accomplished by the author. For each publication, conceptual aspects and empirical aspects were extracted and their respective sub components of interest are shown in Table 3. The year of publication, type of publication and publishing institution were captured to understand the context of the research work. Development of trends concerning the application of lean methodology was developed according to industrial domains, industrial sub-sectors and manufacturing layout strategies. Results of the analysis phase are clearly documented in Section 3.

 

 

3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This section shows the empirical and conceptual aspects of publications on applications of lean manufacturing in South African industry. It is crucial to highlight that the scope of the study was restricted to research work whose empirical boundary is within the confinements of the geographical boundary of the Republic of South Africa. A total of 32 papers for South African industry were published as shown in Figure 2 from 1989 to 2015.

The papers were published by different institutions as shown in Table 4, with a total of 12 journal articles and 20 conference papers (proceedings) to give a total of 32 publications.

 

 

The application of lean manufacturing was divided mainly into two industrial domains which are the production of goods (manufacturing) and services. Publications on manufacturing contributed 66% and 25% of the publications were from the service sector and 9% of the publications encompassed both sectors and was classified under generic category as shown in Figure 3. With reference to Figure 3, lean manufacturing is being slowly adopted into the service industry though the technique originates in manufacturing industry. Its application in the service sector is gradually increasing [26] due the immediate benefits of waste elimination.

 

 

The technique has caught much attention in automotive enterprise management [47] [38] [33] [8] [39] [54], food processing & beverages [41] and assembling of electronic components [52] as shown in Table 2. There has been much interest towards improving the public health care service delivery system [34] [29] and education system [22], [21], [5] throughput. Also in the rail [51], and road transport activities [23] lean tools have been implemented. Notably is the absence of key industrial activities [50] from Table 5 which include iron and steel production, foundry work, airline industry, hotel and catering services.

Absence of publications (in Table 5) on the application of lean in iron and steel production and limited publications on application of lean manufacturing in construction, mining and mineral processing may be due to the perception on the origins of lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing originates from Toyota Production system which was initially aimed at improving assembly line production systems [2]. This explains the trends observed in Figure 4, where focus of published research has been directed mainly on batch manufacturing (31%) and line production (38%) which contributes 69% of total publications under the manufacturing domain. Ras & Visser [43] echo that the absence of lean manufacturing (continuous improvement methodologies) systems in mines is due to the continuous operative nature of the system in which stops and start-ups are only limited to maintenance activities. There is a general voice from researchers advocating for application of lean techniques in any form of activity which include non-profit organisations' operations [4], information technology [26] and accounting services [7]. Despite Lean philosophy being an emblem of Industrial Engineering, the technique is yet to be fully adopted into the South African industry even though the discipline of Industrial Engineering had been existent in the country since 1961 [45].

To determine the implementation and concept adoption of lean principles from the publications in South Africa, the study embarked on a benchmarking process against publications on lean manufacturing for Germany. Germany was selected due to strong bilateral relations between South Africa and Germany, and research collaborations between the two countries. The authors used Scopus database web search engine to gather publications, and using "lean manufacturing" as the search term the initial search results reaped 224 publications. After a thorough screening process, 163 publications were found to be within the confinements of lean manufacturing. The publications' quantity was too much for benchmarking process, the authors then streamlined the publications to a specific timeline of 2014 to 2015. A total number of 22 publications listed in Appendix Table 2 were used to rate publications from South African industry produced within the same time frame. The benchmarking process focused on the objective of the studies which gives the description of the actual research work [53]. The "objective" benchmarking results are documented in Table 6.

Majority of publications from South Africa (2014-2015) aim to develop frameworks [54], models [43] and application of basic lean tools [9] [6] [41] [22] [29], whilst Germany publications (2014-2015) focus on tailor suiting lean principles to perfectly fit local industries [40] [25] [1] [32] . There is much more interest from German to embrace and combine lean manufacturing as an environmental conscious production system [15] [44] [10] which seeks to optimise the use of raw materials and minimise the amount of process wastes into the environment whilst other researchers in South Africa focus on applying lean principles in product design [38] and mineral processing [43], sectors in which lean manufacturing is perceived as alien. Another key missing element from the South African sample is research concerning effective training methods for management and staff on lean practices in organizations to increase their competency levels with regards to lean manufacturing as displayed by Germany publications [28] [17]. Data gathered from Germany indicates that out of the 22 publications sampled, more than 70% of the publications were aimed at improving the adoption and efficiency of that concept(s) whilst more than 55% of publications from South Africa focused on implementation of basic lean tools and framework development as shown by Figure 5. This indicates that implementation of lean manufacturing in South African industry is at the infancy stage and a wide gap exists between South Africa and Germany with respect to research on lean manufacturing and publications available in the public domain.

Results from this study ascertain also the sentiments by Liker [31] that most organisations (in South Africa) think they are lean by just implementing lean tools without considering the other aspects of the philosophy. Focusing on lean tools alone degenerates the objective of implementing lean philosophy which is anchored upon promoting cultural enablers [46] which focus on humility and respect for every employee. Organisations achieve this through ethical leadership that foster staff development by facilitating training and coaching. This will empower employees to be innovative on waste elimination tactics on the production line. Continuous improvement processes will then be achieved through implementation of lean ideas (tools), value stream mapping and support processes [31]. Employees or production staff will now have to strive for perfection whilst production is pulled by customer demand. Though perfection seems unattainable, striving for perfection will make the organisation dock on excellence. Organisations should be consistent when it comes to lean philosophy and lean enterprise thinking, policies should be deployed to maintain standard practices. It is through implementation of lean manufacturing as a culture that the organisation will reap meaningful financial benefits, improved product quality and a disciplined and skilled work force.

 

4 CONCLUSION

The survey conducted displays the trends on publications about lean manufacturing with respect to South African industry. The benchmarking process between South Africa and Germany publications on lean manufacturing displays a huge gap in terms of embracing and implementing the technique.

A wider gap exists specifically on publications that focus on expansion and evaluation of lean concepts as shown in Figure 5. Focus should be directed to exploration of effective learning and training channels for management and production staff to embrace lean philosophy as part of the production culture. Though Industrial Engineers have been present in South Africa for more than 50 years [49] [45], application of lean manufacturing is at infancy level. This is a waste of not fully exploiting Industrial Engineering skills and contributions (human capital waste) [3] [31] in the local manpower nexus. The implementation and adoption gap between Germany and South Africa can only be reduced or eliminated when academic institutions and research centres consider and allocate funds for further research in lean manufacturing. The transition in continuous improvement systems can be facilitated in five phases [54]. The first phase being application of basic lean tools in an unstructured manner of which this level has been attained as displayed by the results of the survey with 55% focusing on the application of basic lean tools. Transformation to the second level is obtained if every worker is made aware of the need to eliminate waste and a structured system for waste elimination is implemented. Level three is possible if strategic management imbed waste elimination as part of company's strategic objectives. Level four is attained when the organisation adopt a proactive approach to process waste elimination and the responsibility of waste elimination is given to line workers and production teams. Full capacity, level five is attained when the organisation adopt a learning behaviour approach. A learning organisation state is reached when the organisation implement proper learning systems in place for its workers and waste elimination is done systematically. It can be safely concluded that there is no systematic research in terms of application of lean manufacturing specifically on the following key economic activities in South Africa [50]: mining and mineral processing, iron and steel making, construction, hotel and catering services.

 

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Submitted by authors 29 Sep 2016
Accepted for publication 1 Apr 2017
Available online 26 May 2017

 

 

* Corresponding author smatope@sun.ac.za
# The author was enrolled for an M Eng. (Research) Industrial Engineering degree in the Department of Industrial Engineering, Stellenbosch University