Discovering Barriers of Lean Manufacturing System Implementation in Malaysian Automotive Industry

Lean manufacturing strategy (LMS) is an acknowledged system that has the capability to realign and effectively focus operational objectives towards achieving higher profitability through improvements by eliminating unneeded or wasteful factors of manufacturing. Implementations of lean within the automotive industry in Malaysia is not far-reaching as expected and is currently being adopted as a pick-and choose system and only applied in certain stages rather than a total systems approach. Thus, not enabling these organizations to fully explore and exploit the systems effectiveness. Even the effective implementation of a single lean tool such as just-in-time can result in significant performance improvements for a firm in question, taking LMS as a total approach reinforces its multiple tools together and the joint value of these complementary LMS tools are significantly greater than the sum of their individual values. Pertinent to this inability to be effective, is the discovery of barriers hindering full adoption of the LMS, this paper attempts to mention and discuss to some extent two of the most crucial elements that persists in its implementation.