Lean Management for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises: Adapting Operations to Changing Business Environment

This book provides a step-by-step guide to implementing lean at SMEs using an approach that has been tested and fine-tuned at over a hundred organizations across India, South East Asia and the Middle East. The book approaches Lean through an implementation project cycle flow and enables the reader to understand the imperative for Lean, how to diagnose current operations, how to plan and deploy Lean and shows a path for long-term sustenance.

Diverse situations such as meeting the demand fluctuations, designing a facility, or improving profit margin etc. are included in the case studies from multiple sectors, to ensure that every reader finds a situation similar to their organizational situation. While the publicly available literature on lean offers a large collection of tools and techniques, given each organization’s unique context, the choice of the right sequence of tools differ. The book offers guidelines in terms of which solutions work in which context, backed by real-cases, which is a big help to the resource constrained SMEs. This book is an equally good resource for the organizations that have already implemented lean, as it provides realistic pointers about sustaining, tackling supply chain uncertainties and going beyond Lean by integrating emerging technologies and management principles. It is an excellent resource for students and researchers studying this area and also for corporates, professionals and industry watchers.

​Ganesh Mahadevan is a partner and Lead Consultant at Kanzen Institute Asia Pacific Pvt. Ltd. (www.kiap.in), India, an organization co-founded by former associates of global Kaizen Sensei Masaaki Imai. With a Bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, and a Masters in Business Management in operations management, his initial years were spent in global majors in the aluminium industry including HINDALCO and Pyrotek. After a four-year stint in Deloitte’s process consulting practice he joined KIAP in 2007 and has since worked extensively on more than sixty comprehensive Lean transformations across a wide range of industry sectors, sizes, and geographies. He is an empanelled Lean Expert with the Government of India and successfully led lean implementations in several MSME clusters under the NMCP scheme.

Kalyana C. Chejarla is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Management Technology, Hyderabad. He obtained his PhD from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow, completed his postgraduate studies from Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and ICFAI Business School, and holds a B.Sc. (Engineering) from National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur. His areas of interest are operations, logistics and supply chain management, lean and quality management, and business process management. Before moving into academics in 2014, he has worked for about 18 years in the supply chain domain at globally renowned organizations such as Tata Motors, HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Dell International Services, working extensively with clients in US and Japan.