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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.