The impact of lean practices on performance: based on meta-analysis and Bayesian network

Abstract

It has always been the primary concern of the researchers and practitioners to carry out lean production successfully in enterprises. Most of the existing studies use performance as a measure to investigate the impact of lean practices on performance through empirical methods, and stated that lean practices have a positive impact on enterprise performance. However, there is a scarcity of in-depth studies on the non-linear relationship between lean practices and enterprise performance. In this paper, a composite approach was proposed to solve this problem. First, the relationship between lean practices and enterprise performance was examined by Meta-analysis. Then based on the analysis result, a Bayesian network was constructed, which was used to analyse the non-linear relationship between lean practices and enterprise performance. The results indicated that lean practices have positive effects on operational performance and non-operational performance. However, the probabilities of different enterprise performance levels change disproportionately with different lean practices levels. The conclusion of this paper can be used to understand the non-linear relationship between lean practices and enterprise performance, and provides a broad perspective for understanding the application of lean practices in the enterprise.

Keywords:

• lean practices
• enterprise performance
• non-linear relationship
• meta-analysis
• Bayesian network

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Number 71071107.