Lean Manufacturing measurement : The relationships between Lean activities and Lean metrics

Lean Manufacturing was developed by Toyota Motor company to address their specific needs in a restricted market in times of economic trouble. These concepts have been studied and proven to be transferrable and applicable to a wide variety of industries. This paper aims to integrate a set of metrics that have been proposed by different authors in such a way that they are consistent with the different stages and elements of Lean Manufacturing implementations. To achieve this, two frameworks for Lean implementations are presented and then the main factors for success are used as the basis to propose metrics that measure the advance in these factors. A tabular display of the impact of “Lean activities” on the metrics is presented, proposing that many a priori assumptions about the benefits on many different levels of improvement should be accurate. Finally, some ideas for future research and extension of the applications proposed on this paper are presented as closing points.