Exploring Visual Management and Continuous Improvement in a Manufacturing Context: A Structured Bibliometric Analysis

Many manufacturing organisations rely on continuous improvement (CI) activities to maintain their competitive position. Here, effective communication is seen as critical in facilitating the alignment of corporate strategy and CI efforts. As many firms increasingly struggle to ensure effective internal communication due to time pressures and the need to continuously adapt strategic information, visual management (VM) can provide a means to support effective information transfer. Therefore, this paper explores the impact of VM on CI within a manufacturing context by first systematically reviewing and summarising the extant literature. A bibliometric analysis reveals that while VM offers great potential to support CI efforts, the field lacks systematic and holistic scholarly examination in a number of areas. For example, the association of CI as a dynamic capability and the impact of digitalisation in connecting VM and CI