Lean manufacturing: a perspective of lean suppliers

The main thrust of this paper empirically examines the connection between lean production and various aspects of the logistics system. This paper performs a comparison analysis to find whether significant performance/practice differences exist between lean suppliers and non-lean suppliers. The research findings indicate that, even given the same organizational constraints and resources, lean suppliers gain significant competitive advantages over non-lean suppliers in production systems, distribution systems, information communications, containerization, transportation systems, customer-supplier relationships, and on-time staging/delivery performance.