A Study of Lean Adopting Practices Among Indian Manufacturing Employees: A Case Study at Awarpur Cement Works

Abstract

The most important E’s in today’s manufacturing realm are efficiency and effectiveness and one model that assures both is “Lean Manufacturing”. It is all about maximising customer value while minimizing wastes. Many techniques have been applied to successfully implement the lean practices. But meagre research has been carried out to study the human behavioural aspects in adopting lean practices. The purpose of this paper is to test the efficacy of Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) in predicting lean adopting practices, which holds that intention is a strong determinant of behaviour in people. With this cue, the study is conducted among the employees working at Awarpur Cement Works, Maharashtra (UltraTech Cements, Aditya Birla Group). TPB comprising of attitude, subjective norms (SN), self-efficacy (SE) and facilitating conditions (FC) have been studied in relation to lean adopting intentions. Prior to the main study, qualitative research was conducted to identify the various advantages, facilitators and barriers in the implementation of lean behaviour among the target population in order to operationalize the constructs. Multiple regression analysis using software SPSS (version 17) for 110 responses was used to test the hypotheses. A total of 50% of the variance of lean implementation intentions was explained by the TPB variables. The FC (β=0.60) was the strongest predictor of the lean intentions followed by SE (β=0.22) and attitude (β=0.18), however as expected SN showed no significant impact. The paper ends with the results, conclusions, limitations and with suggestions for future avenues.