Mediation Effect of Lean: A Bidirectional Synergetic Relationship with SCM for Higher Operational Performance

Abstract

Competitive plants focus their efforts on reducing manufacturing costs and waste along their production chains. Hence, manufacturing programs with important practices and methodologies such as lean, JIT, TPM, and Kaizen have been embraced. However, an empirical investigation of simultaneous use of several manufacturing programs representing multiple facets of lean is lacking in the literature. Various studies have found that some supply chain management practices are bi-directionally related to lean, but its holistic measurement in relation to supply chain management is still lacking. Thus, this paper provides an evidence of mediation effect of lean from high performance manufacturing (HPM) project perspective in relation to supply chain management.