Lean production practices in Bangladesh: an investigation into the extent of practices and the existence of enabling environments for lean implementation

Lean Production has overcome the perception of being another management fad. An increasing number of organizations in developing countries are implementing lean production in order to generate improvements in performance and remain competitive. A sample of nine garment companies (seven companies from the Export Processing Zone (EPZ) and two companies from outside of the EPZ) of Bangladesh was chosen to conduct the study. A field survey with a semi-structured questionnaire, interviews and site visits was conducted to gather necessary information from the companies. These companies were selected purposively to ensure the best possible scenario of lean practices in Bangladesh. The main thrust of this research is to examine the extent of lean practices in the Bangladeshi garment industry to improve the manufacturing performance, and identify factors for an enabling environment for practicing lean successfully. This study performs a comparative analysis to explore the association between the results of the present study with other global studies examining similar philosophies. The research findings indicate that the selected companies have adopted a wide variety lean tools and techniques and gained many improvements. Findings also identified several supporting factors as well as factors that hindered the lean implementation initiatives. It concludes with suggestions for further work