Lean deployment in international companies: how to become a learning organization through continuous improvement and Hoshin Kanri: a case study in Guanxi culture

Lean born in Japan as a philosophy declined in the automotive world. The Japanese implementation was a holistic and systemic model, which included strategy, operations, and continuous improvement culture. After the success of Toyota, Western companies tried to implement lean leaving out the organicity and preferring the implementation through stand-alone practices such as lean production, lean supply chain or lean management. This kind of implementation led to many best practices but at the same time many cases of failure. The literature about Lean treats the different aspects of lean in different streams: context analysis; change management; lean practices; lean culture. Even if most of the authors in literature agree to define the corporate and employee culture as the main challenge in implementing lean, and with the spread of globalization culture and the geopolitical context are taking on increasingly central roles, there are no frameworks that deal with the systemic implementation of lean. This research aims to define a framework for lean deployment in international companies, which considers systematically all the aspects of lean, to obtain sustainable results over time. The hypotheses behind the research are the centrality of culture and the geopolitical context, and the definition of an organizational structure based on strategy as an enabling factor for lean performances. To maintain lean performances over time, the proposed framework aims to structure the culture of continuous improvement by transforming the organization into a learning organization. This research was conducted following the theories of action research. The Action Research path lasted four years and involved several AR projects. This research resumes the findings of the three main projects that let the definition of the proposed framework for lean deployment. These projects were carried out at three different companies working respectively in the fields of mechatronics, fast food delivery and electronics for sensors. The three companies differ not only in the field but also in their size and territorial extension. All three companies had in common the desire to apply lean in a structured way on their production processes to standardize and simplify them. The innovations described in the research are numerous. The main innovation consists of integrating context reading tools (both external geopolitical and cultural and internal to the organization), change management models and strategy deployment models into a single framework based on Hoshin Kanri (HK). These models are integrated into a new open structure which is not prescriptive for the method to be implemented in the individual phases. That allows the implementation in different contexts. Another innovation concerns the catch ball process declination in Chinese culture. The implementation of the proposed framework and the new catch ball process is presented in the case study chapter. The implementation of the framework shows that it can successfully support the transformation of the organization into a learning organization. The Action Research has successfully combined practical cases and research activities providing a mutual boost and supporting the goal of the project.