Abstract:
Continuous improvement (CI), as part of the lean principles, is a business philosophy that gained considerable attention in both the academic and the business field during the past decade. Yet, when developing lean organisations, the dominant perspective focuses on the implementation of lean operations, rather than on developing a company-wide philosophy of CI that enhances the lean approach. In practice, developing CI is still found to be difficult. Therefore, this paper aimed to determine how CI in lean management can be facilitated by testing critical success factors (CSFs) for improvement routines. Although the focus in literature is on CI development in large organisations, this paper examines CSFs specifically for manufacturing SMEs. For this quantitative study, a relevant existing database of the Research Group Lean/ World Class performance at HAN University of Applied sciences was analysed. The findings show that success factors critical for the starting phase of CI are good communication, a focus on learning, a performance measurement system, improvement training and sufficient resources. More advanced CI SMEs are facilitated by top management support, a shared improvement vision, a customer focus and congruence of support. These results provide guidance for lean practitioners that seek to develop CI in manufacturing SMEs.
