Lean management and a field research on its applications

We are now well into the 21st century and the widely known saying that "the only certainty is change process" is truer than ever before. The major characteristics of this change process are economic, social, political ans cultural changes occured due to globalization. One of the most important implication of these changes is, in fact, its effect on the management and production processes of organizations. The increasing inability of the traditional approaches to respond to the changes have effectively ended their era of dominance. The objective of this thesis study was to analyze the crisis of the traditional production and management approaches and introduce Lean Management which has taken place in the management literature associated with TQM since 1990's. Lean Management is introduced as the evolution of a new philosophy in order to overcome the crisis by adapting itself to the new socioeconomic conditions and by changing management processes through increasing team working, empowerment, intensive education and training and providing coach leaders. In the thesis, a field study which analyzed the implementation of lean management at Turkish companies is also presented. In the study, the factors, conditions and the development of lean management as well as the innovations that lean management brought to organization structure and management processes are discussed. The field study aimed at analyzing how Turkish companies view lean management and how they apply lean management principles to their operations. The results of this study indicate that lean management is not effectively applied at the companies researched but the efforts they put into are promising for future.