Critical success factors in establishing and sustaining lean management

Lean management as an research subject of this study will be the claim of some academicians as well as business leaders to be an alternative management system to the ones called conventional management. The Word "lean" is firstly mentioned in 1988 by John Krafcik who is MIT researcher and first engineer employed by NUMMI which is first joint venture auto maker company of Japanese (Toyota) and USA (General Motor) , "Lean management" is also known as Toyota production system (TPS).Toyota production System at initial stage and Lean management in following stage have started to attract academic and business media as an production and management methodology, Toyota Production System or Lean Management system has been called as a driver for creation of Japanese miracle in industry development in general and in automotive industry in special, those management styles have also been called as "Japanese Management System". The purpose of this research is supposed to be an investigation over critical factors in establishing & sustaining lean management in organizations.Eighty two articles were scanned, Sixty six articles were used as reference but fifty six articles were used in order to investigate and classify variables in constructs, sub-constructs and sub-sub-constructs format by a qualitative study.Those articles were selected from well-known journals covering theoretical and practical business topics. Data collection was realized over those empirical and qualitative researches, qualitative data analysis and discussionare presented to reach findings and conclusion. Key words:Lean management, Lean manufacturing, Lean production, Just-In-Time,Pull production system, Total Productive Maintenance, Total Qualitymanagement,Waste reduction, Cellularproduction, Value stream mapping, Continuous flow, Single piece flow,Statistical process control, Flexible production, Continuous improvement, Supply chain integration.