Resilience for lean organisational network

Abstract

In the literature, when lean is associated with resilience the focus is mainly on developing leaner and more resilient supply chains underrating the importance of organisations as communicating entities. Although people are the heart of a company, their impact on resilience is only marginally considered in the literature. In this study, we address these gaps by developing and testing a model that can calculate the resilience of a lean organisation while considering the organisational topology as well as the learning capacity and attitudes of its workforce. The proposed methodology consists of four macro-steps: identification of a Lean Structural Network (LSN), modelling of nodes, nodes characterisation and analysis of Resilience. A case study is used to explain the proposed model to assess the resilience of the intrinsic structure of a company against two major effects: (a) unexpected shortages in key performance indicators; (b) replacement of a process owner with another having different individual characteristics (different learning curve and attitude). The results show that the proposed methodology allows quantification and prediction of the local and global impacts of unexpected (i.e. failures or other disruptions) and expected events (i.e. cross-training, personnel relocation) in companies under the LSN paradigm.

Keywords:

• lean management
• resilience management
• human resource management
• networks
• human factors

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to express their appreciation to the Center for Leadership Mannheim consulting firm, which provides us with anonymous organisational data, thereby helping the development.