Modeling and Simulation to Assess the Role of Culture for Successful Lean Transformations

Lean manufacturing has been embraced by many companies as the business model to promote operational excellence. However, a high percentage of lean implementation attempts have failed. This failure is often attributed to the sole focus on the hard side (tools) of lean, at the expense of the soft side (culture). Most of the research investigating the culture-related aspects of lean either attempt to raise awareness about culture or merely promote a conceptual approach. This paper proposes a simulation-based method that can be used to identify and assess the role of various factors essential to forming an organizational culture conducive to successful lean transformations. The culture of an organization emerges from interaction among members, interaction with the environment, and personal attributes. Agent-based modeling is an effective technique for evaluating dynamic systems of interacting agents and therefore is potent for modeling complexities that arise from interactions of the system components. However, due to blurred indicators which exist in defining culture, many measures are described subjectively by linguistic terms. Therefore, the use of fuzzy logic is proposed to emulate subjective human decision making by team members during interactions. Preliminary efforts for fuzzy-integrated, agent-based modeling and simulation are presented in an attempt to demonstrate the potential of using the method to identify and assess factors influencing organizational culture for lean transformations.