Critical Issues of Lean Implementation in Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises-an Analysis

Lean manufacturing is a strategic tool, which is used to reduce waste and to improve the efficiency of an organization. Indian MSME’s are struggling to implement these techniques. The aim of the study is to investigate the various critical issues faced by the Indian MSMEs while implementing lean. A questionnaire containing 29 problems under five categories was prepared and sent to 200 MSME’s all over India. Eighty two companies responded and their responses were analyzed using the IBM SPSS statistics 20 package to find the rating on various issues. Ratings were also obtained from three lean consultants and compared to find the closer value. This enables to have better understanding on critical issues for successful implementation.


INTRODUCTION
Indian MSME's are an integral part of Indian economy.The contribution to the economic development of the country is indeed significant, due to liberalization and globalization; Indian MSME's are facing tremendous challenges.Imports and MNCs and especially china are becoming major threats to Indian industries.Raje (2000) have discussed about the important threats and opportunities offered by globalization.For many industries abroad, Lean thinking is a way of life.But in India Lean implementation is still in its eagerly stage.LM have-not received due attention in MSME's globally Gunasekaran (2000).Indian government has also started focusing on MSME's by cluster formation to implement Lean.Many issues and constraints in MSME's made them to delay implementing Lean techniques.Many Indian MSME's failed to implement Lean successfully.These MSME's, those who started implementing LM in piecemeal, were found difficult to implement totally.In order to implement LM successfully in future, it is necessary to identify various issues faced by them while implementing LM tools.

LITERATURE REVIEW
LM was originally developed in Japanese auto industry by Taiichi ohno.It requires focus on making product flow through value adding process.It intends to eliminate the waste from productive system.Liker (2004) and Mothani (2000) have clearly explained the important elements of lean manufacturing.Paransaker et al. (2003) have discussed that the organizations that have mastered LM methods have substantial cost and quality advantages over those who still using mass production.Womeck et al. (1990) said that LM combines the best features of both mass and craft production.Theoretically, LM can be applied to all the industries and it is considered as Strategic tool in the competitive market (Womeck et al., 1990;Billesbach, 1991;Bamber and Date, 2000;Achanga et al., 2006) discussed that LM has been implemented successfully in LS industries, but has only little evidence at SME's.Anthony and Kumar (2005) described in detail that small companies have more advantages such as agility, easier in petting management support etc. Spann et al. (1999) addressed that implementation of Lean manufacturing in SME's will lead to huge benefits such as quality improvement, reduction in cycle time.Many researchers says that, SME's fail much more frequently by market competition Anthony and Kumar (2005) indicated that cellular manufacturing and Kanban system were not so easy to implement and suggested to implement JIT in phased manner.Nitin et al. (2010) described in detail that most important barrier are Non uniformity, corruption, power problem, transport, infra structure, cultural resistance, family setup.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
From the literature review it is very clear that, very little research has been done (or) far related with Indian MSMEs.Nearly 29 Lean implementation issues were identified by consulting industry personals, consultants and divided them under five important categories, i.e., problems related with Employees, Management, Supplier, Customer and organization.
Further these issues were analyzed and rated to find their importance by using latest IBM SPSS statistics 20 package tools.Three Lean consultants were used to give their expert opinion and compared with their ranking.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A questionnaire was prepared after identifying 29 problems of lean implementation with discussion to industrial personals, consultants and sent to 200 Indian MSME's.The responses of 82 industries were received on a four-point scale ranging from low to very high.Later 29 lean issues in reduced in to five broad categories, i.e., customer's issues, organizational issues, supplier issues, employee issues and management issues.Further descriptive statistics was used to find the importance of lean issues to Indian industry by using the latest IBM SPSS statistics 20 package which has the recent statistical tools.
First we have organized our data in the form of cross tabulation to find out the major issues from the above five issues (customers issues, organizational issues, supplier issues, employee issues and management issues) which are given in the Table 1  and 2.
The measures of central tendency gives the main idea (central part) of the data and the measures of dispersion gives the complete idea of the data.Hence,  -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  next we focus on the report with the major central tendency, called mean, median, measures of dispersion, called standard deviation, variance and range.Moreover, the skewness and kurtosis are also obtained so that we can observe the main idea (Centre part) and the complete idea of our data.The Table 3 and 4 gives such reports (descriptive analysis).Now, one can observe that the organizational issues have the highest average and standard deviation whereas the management issues have minimum aggregate with mean and standard deviation.Moreover, the skewness represents the lack of symmetry which indicates whether the frequency curve is turned more to one side than to the other.If the data is symmetric, then the skewness is zero.But, here except the customer issue, the remaining are all negatively skewed and hence the mode (maximum frequency) is greater than their average for them.The kurutosis represents the flatness of the frequency curve and depends on the number of items near to the mode (maximum frequency) and it is denoted by β 2 .If β 2 = 3, then the frequency curve is moderately peaked or moderately flat and it is said to be mesokurtic.If β 2 <3, then the frequency curve is largely flat and it is said to be platykurtic.
If β 2 >3, then the frequency curve is highly peaked and it is said to be leptokurtic.Also the excess of kurtosis is defined by γ 2 = β 2 -3.Here, all the issues have the kurtosis less than 3 of which the kurtosis of management issue is very nearer to zero.
The mean rating of the issues and lean implementation issues are represented in the frequency curves in Fig. 1 and 2. So that one can easily identify that the organizational issues are with top rated and the management issues are with low average.The bar charts are given for the number of frequencies of the different varieties of ratings for the issues and lean implementation issues in the Fig. 3 to 5, from which the ratings "high" and "very high" have the maximum points for organizational issues whereas it is very for management issues.
So Organizational issues play the vital role in Indian markets and the management issues become the negligible one.Thus, it is observed that the lean issues play the roles in the following order: Organizational issues, Supplier issues, Customer issues, Employee issues, Management issues.It shows that the organizational issue plays the major role and the management issue has the less importance.
Hence, The Issues and Lean implementation issues are highly positive correlated (same direction): • The Issues and the ratings are negatively correlated (opposite direction).• Lean implementation issues and the ratings are negatively correlated shown in Table 5 (opposite direction).
The paired sample tests in Table 6 also show that there is significant difference between the below three pairs.
In Table 7 and 8 ANOVA provides a statistical test of whether or not the means of several groups are equal and its sums of squares indicate the variance of each component of the decomposition.Comparisons of mean squares allow testing of a nested sequence of models.

Chi square test:
The sampling test is also the most important one in analysis of data.The chi square test can be used to test the uniformity of the distribution.Here, we used the chi square test to check whether the following five types of issues play the role uniformly in the Indian market or not (Table 9 to 11 and Fig. 6).
Null hypothesis H 0 : The five types of issues play the role uniformly in the Indian market.
Alternative hypothesis H 1 : The five types of issues do not play the role uniformly in the Indian market.Clearly the calculated Chi square value is very high for both issues and ratings.Hence the five types of issues do not play the role uniformly in the Indian market.

Fig
Fig.1: Mean rating of issues

Fig. 2 :
Fig. 2: Mean rating of lean implementation issues Fig. 4: Bar chart for ratings on lean implementation issues Fig. 6: Hypothesis test summary

Fig. 7 :
Fig. 7: Control chart ratingControl chart:The control charts are usually used to check whether the quality is under control or not.Here, we used this technique to test whether the issues are under control or not.

Table 1 :
Cross tabulation between issues and rating

Table 2 :
Cross tabulation between lean implementation issues and rating

Table 5 :
Correlation co-efficient Karl Pearson's coefficient of correlation -

Table 6 :
Paired sample test Paired differences