LEAN RESEARCH ON MALAYSIA MANUFACTURING SECTOR: A GENERAL REVIEW

RISYAWATI MOHD ISMAIL RAZLI CHE RAZAK UUM College Of Business Universiti Utara Malaysia

ABSTRACT
This paper a general review of past researches done on lean manufacturing practices among Malaysia manufacturers.The paper is based on reviews made on contemporary published journals on the subject of lean manufacturing practices among Malaysias manufacturers.It is shown that scarce empirical research and studies on how Malaysias manufacturers are implementing and practicing lean. This investigation also revealed that most lean related research conducted so far directed toward specified product- type manufacturers.It was also found that existing research only focuses on several variants of lean manufacturing such as JIT , Kaizen and Value Stream ,with less attention on studying lean as a total operational system.This paper would prove invaluable to future lean base research by providing researchers with the summation of actual lean researchon Malaysia manufacturers and clearly defining the gap in the study.

INTRODUCTION
In order to understand the impact of any chosen manufacturing strategies, its it very important to gauge the width and depth of the subject matter. This could be done by assessing historical researches that was conducted on the topics and how much genuine information was collected over time. This process is even more vital when attempts are being made to further explore the subject in order to ensure and facilitate meaningful and beneficial future researches. This paper begins with a review of Malaysia manufacturing sectors data that clearly indicate the importance of the sector towards the growth of the nation. This is follows with a literature review written on lean manufacturing globally and how it impacted the manufacturing companies all over the world. And finally the paper approaches a more focus area which scrutinized the same research topics conducted in Malaysia. At this stage, this paper identify the limitation encountered during the literature analysis and how the finding comes to its conclusion.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Manufacturing sector in Malaysia It is without any doubt the manufacturing sector is one of the most important drivers to the growth of the Malaysian economy, to date this sector employs more than 900,000 workers nationwide.When the first census was conducted by the department in 1959, the manufacturing sector posed RM 1,218 million of gross output value and by the time the last census was conducted in 2008, the value had increased to RM 742.9 billion (MPC, 2008). The largest industry sub-sector in Malaysia is electrical and electronics (22.6 %), followed by food, beverage and tobacco (16 %), chemicals (14.3 %), fabrication of metal (12 %), plastics (9.3 %), and the rest is in other industry sub-sectors. Based on data collected by the Department of Statistic Malaysia, by the end of 2007, there were 32,584 manufacturing facilities in Malaysia with gross output value of RM742.9 billion This figure outlined the significant contribution of the manufacturing sector towards the growth of the nations economy and how far it has developed over time and how significant it has become as the pulse of our nations economy. Manufacturing strategy The growing of global competition have made businesses around the world more difficult and complicated than before. Every company have tried to search for a solution to aid their survival and for ensuring that their business remain successful and competitive.Therefore, many manufacturing companies try to search for a strategy that can make their process more effective in order to survive and compete, which lead to manufacturers undertaking lean manufacturing as part of their operational manufacturing strategy evolution in combating fierce global competition to stay ahead in the business.Manufacturing strategy is generally defined as the development of specific competitive strength based on the operation function and the use of manufacturing capabilities to achieve manufacturing goals (Amoako, 2003) .Lean production as a strategy has brought changes in management practices to improve customer satisfaction as well as organizational effectiveness and efficiency (Karim, 2009). One of the pioneer researcher in manufacturing strategy (MS) , Skinner(1996) defined MS as exploiting certain manufacturing function as competitive weapon.MS includes making decisions and plans affecting resources and policies directly related to the sourcing, production and delivery of tangible products by positioning the company resources in a way which enhances its competitive position in the marketplace (Swink and Way,1995). Industries choose to follow operation strategies such as lean manufacturing (LM), agile manufacturing and six sigma to achieve a better competitive advantage , achieve productivity improvement and emerged as top player in their field (Seth and Gupta , 2005; Tsang and Chan,2000;Anand and Kodali,2009).There for it is without a doubt that the right manufacturing strategy is always an important driver in ensuring companys higher performance.Lean is defined as the systematic removal of waste by all members of the organization from all areas of the value system (Womack and Jones,1994), a philosophy that when implemented reduce the time for customer order to delivery by eradicating source of waste in the production flow (Liker,1996) while stressing the need for continuous improvement (Papadoupoulou and zbayrak ,2006). Organization have moved towards LM by adapting different lean tools such as Just in time, set up reduction, 5S,TPM, etc. LM uses tools like one-pieceflow, visualcontrol, Kaizen, cellularmanufacturing, inventory
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management, poka yoke, standardizedwork, workplace organization, and scrap reduction to reduce manufacturing waste (Russell and Taylor, 1999). Lean as a strategy The very core of LM as a strategy is the elimination of waste from the production system. Early on LM was given the scrutiny as the whole revolution that started on the production floor however soon it developed into a wider scope of practices that included lean management practices and even involved the entire supply chain management of companies.Lean is based on learning from Toyota who increased market share by improving their processes, most notably on the shop floor, but also in design and development, by the application of process rigour (Ohno, 1988). Lean is value stream focussed encompassing the focal company, customers and supply chain partners (Lewis, 2000). Womack et al.(1991) used the term lean to describe the approach they observed as Toyota endeavoured to eliminate waste and to improve efficiency (Womack and Jones, 1996). As lean practises widened over time this philosophy becomes more than just a set of tools but was embraced as a total operation strategy. Lean manufacturing and performance Various studies have been conducted globally on the effect of lean implementation on organizational and operational performance as a whole .These studies clearly indicate that adoption of lean practices clearly lead towards an increase in performance (Fullerton et al. 2009 ; Shah and Ward ,2003 ;Wood et al. , 2004;Hanson and Voss,1998).Published literatures also suggested that lean practices implementation would also positively influence operational flexibility (Ahmad et al.,2003 ; Matsui ,2007) and significantly reduce manufacturing lead time (Shah and Ward ,2003; Ahmad et al.,2004; Abdallah and Matsui ,2007). Shah and Ward (2003) found that the influence of lean practices contributes significantly to the operating performance of plants .Lean manufacturing practices superiority have been proven and continue to be rated as extremely effective (Papadopoulouet al.,2004) in ensuring that organizations derived enormous benefits for this transition (Wong et al.,2009). In judging whether LM implementation could improves operational performance it is very important to bare in mind that time factor must be considered and given resources constraints , companies cannot afford to improve every operational elements at the same time and priorities must be set. This will be the beginning phase where improvement is only marginal .Any possible time lags between implementation and performance changes should be given adequate attention and taken into account when lean impacts are being measured and different improvement programs always develop different capabilities over time(Gonzalez-Benito ,2005 ; Hallgren and Olhager,2009 ). However there are enough evidence safely said that implementation of LM does propel company performance when given the an adequate amount of time to develop and significantly impacted company performance. There for it has been concretely proven that lean implementation in an organization would resulted in overall operational and organizational increase in performance, which will only benefit the company and strengthened the overall entity (Lewis, 2000; Hng and Mohd Zameri ,2004;Taj,2005).

Issues of LM research in Malaysia Due to its importance to the nations economy a lot of researches were focused on this sector, providing useful insight into the industry from various perspectives .Past researches regularly focused on key operational strategies that includes (but not limited to) supply chain management , quality dimensions , human research development and production and operation management. National Productivity Report 2009 indicated that in the period of 2005-2009 Malaysia manufacturing recorded an increase of 0.5 % in total factor productivity and in their published report suggested that this was due to the implementation of various improvement activities in the manufacturing operation that includedLM.However despite the suggestion, theres lack of published empirical study on the overall adoption, degree of successfulness or even the direct impact of this manufacturing strategies on operational performance in Malaysia. Unlike TQM , empirical research in lean manufacturing is relatively less in Malaysia (Samat and Saad,2006) and hardly any studies have been done in Malaysia on how our manufacturers are adopting and practicing lean (Wong et al.,2009).This fact is baffling as the adoption of lean by global manufacturers as part of their operational strategy evolution in combating fierce global competition to stay ahead in the business is well documented and it has been proven that LM has contributed significantly to the success of Japanese and US organizations for the last three decades(Finch,2008). Thus it is mind boggling that the same operation strategy is not being vigorously and scrutinized in depth empericallyin Malaysia. Research Approach Literature reviewed was done on published literature between 1995-2009.Findings are summarized in Table 1.0.During literature analysis it was observed that the number of lean literature on Malaysia manufacturers was very scarce and this is a clear indication as how low the coverage of this subject and how small the availability of such literature to aid any future research. Table 1.0 Principle components of lean multi dimension that are studied in regards to Malaysia manufacturers Lean Collective Terms JIT Specific characteristics Production levelling(heijuka) Pull system(Kanban) Takted production Process synchronization Small lot production Authors Simpson. et al.(1998)

Resource Reduction

Lim et al.(1999)

Waste elimination Setup time Reduction Lead time reduction Inventory reduction HR Management Team organization

Puvanaswaranet al.(2009,2008) ,
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Improvement strategies

Cross training Employee involvement Improvement circles Continuous improvement(kaizen) Root cause analyses

Rozhan and Rohayu (2008) Loi (2004) Rosnah(2004) Effendi(2008) Wong et.al. (2009)

Defect control

Supply chain management Standardization

Automation(Jidoka) Failure prevention(poka yoke) 100% inspection Line Stop(Andon) Value stream mapping

Scientific management

TQM TPM

Supplier involvement Housekeeping(5S) Standardized work Visual control and management Policy Wan Hasrulnizzam(2008) deployment(honsinkanri) Time/work studies Multi manning Work force reduction Layout adjustment Cellular manufacturing Statistical quality control Preventive maintenance Shamsuddinet al.(2004) SMED

Ndubisi ,Nelson. O. et al.(2005), Boon, K.B. et al. (2004), A. Seetharamanet al.(2004)

DISCUSSION
This paper generallyaimed to investigate the depth of researches conducted on lean in context of the Malaysia manufacturers . Literature review however showed that the majority of previous research so far were directed toward specified manufacturer such as automobiles (Simpson et al., 1998), aeronautical (Puvanaswaranet al., 2009; Effendi et al.,2009) and mostly on electric and electronic manufacturers (Wong et al. ,2009 ; Boon ,2004 ;Wong , 2009 ) whereas Malaysias manufacturing sector included more than the studied sectors , such as iron and steel ,chemical and chemical products , food and beverage, wood and wood products ,oil and gas and others .Manufacturing sector in Malaysia are much more comprehensive compared to the studied industries with at least 15 major subsector with oil and gas being the leader yet oil and gas niche has never been studied before from the lean perspective. This glaring omission goes to show that the study of lean in the manufacturing sector as a whole is still lacking and provide wide opportunities for future exploration as
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major sectorssuch as food and beverage, fabricated metal, machinery and etc. has yet to receive any scrutiny by lean researchers. Apart from lack of data contribution from several portions of the manufacturing sector , these studies also focused heavily on selected dimensions of lean such asimprovement strategies (Loi , 2004; Rosnah , 2004 ; Effendi,2008 ;Wong ,2009) andsupply chain management (Ndubisiet al.,2005;Boon et al.,2004;Seetharamanet al.,2004). Lean manufacturing has been known to a multi- dimensional strategy (as indicated in Table 1.0) which encompassed a wide variety of management and operation practices that include JIT ,quality system ,supplier management and others.These elements operate in synergistic within an integrated system to help manufacturers achieve better operational and organizational performance.There for a partial undertaking on lean dimensions are deemed in adequate to provide accurate information on the practice and its impact towards any organizations.

CONCLUSION
Due to the significant strategic importance of lean in increasing manufacturers operational and organizational performance and the crucial importance of this sector to Malaysia economy,it is concluded that the research so far is inadequate and leave many aspects to be ponder and explore in the future to address this deficiency. Various sub sectors such as the food and beverage as well as oil and gas should be given proper attention in order to understand the level of implementation in Malaysia manufacturing sector .It is also very important that such cross sectional study is under taken to understand if lean production differ from one subsector to another .This could provide much need insight into the manufacturing sub sectors and how they differ in term of manufacturing strategy, operational elements and others. It is important to understand how lean affected firms performance and by conducting further study on this matter, we could see the lean implementation effects on various sub sectors and whether it differs cross sectional. This paper argues that due to the significant strategic importance of lean to these manufacturers, it should rendered a thorough and broader research in the future. Overall it can be concluded that published literature on this subject is still lacking and future research should be conducted to address this deficiency

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