Lean manufacturing in developing countries: evidence from Indian SMEs

India is emerging as a new manufacturing destination and many companies are seeking ways to increase the value of their products and services by eliminating unnecessary processes and wasteful practices from their production systems. The powerful lean manufacturing approach that has proved successful as an operations model in developed economies, as well as in some large Indian companies, is now increasingly being recognized by the small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this research is to investigate the adoption of lean production in India and to examine the lean practices deployed by the SMEs. The case study methodology was utilized and the paper presents the findings of four SMEs in India that have implemented lean strategy to drive significant improvement in manufacturing performance.