Lean Supply-chain:A State-Of-The-Art Literature Review

Lean practices are meant to reduce the unwanted activities from a system and use only as much resources as are necessary for that matter. In today's world, the manufacturing organisations are trying tooth and nail to get an edge over their competitors. This makes them obligatory to improve their production process which in turn requires a very effective and efficient supply chain system. It has made the researchers focus on this area of manufacturing and add some valuable contributions towards the betterment of manufacturing industry and the society as a whole. Review papers provide a great help to researchers in identifying the areas that need improvement and avoid redundancy of the efforts. Although a wide range of researches has been done on lean and supply chain separately, the integrated view of lean and supply chain is still suffering to receive the attention of a large stream of researchers. In the same context, to help researchers, this paper tries to identify the important researches and also find some key aspects that need to be explored. As, to the knowledge of the researchers, there are no review papers on lean supply chain till now, this paper assumes a greater relevance. The literature on the lean supply chain is exhaustively covered under the limitations of the resources, is classified on the bases of year, country, industry and journal and discussed lucidly followed by findings and conclusion. The literature identifies three phases of researches and highlights future research avenues.