Corporate Lean Management

Abstract

In today’s rapidly changing industrial landscape, multinational production corporations face considerable challenges in realising lasting performance improvements through lean management across their global production networks. Decades after the widespread implementation of lean, the critical challenge of how to manage and align local factory improvements with overarching corporate strategies for operational excellence remains. The complexity intensifies when companies attempt to manage large-scale lean transformations at a global corporation level, raising crucial questions about how such transformations are managed, adapted, and sustained over time. This thesis addresses this gap by examining how companies design, implement, and sustain corporate-level lean strategies—particularly through the management of company-specific production systems (XPSs). Through five in-depth qualitative studies conducted in large industrial production corporations, the research uncovers how practitioners face recurring obstacles characteristic of multisite lean implementation. The main themes that emerged concerned the need to invest in employee training and capability-building, while simultaneously achieving measurable performance improvements. While global standardisation of improvement tools is a common approach, it proves resource-intensive and often insufficient without embedding organisational learning principles and adaptability to local needs. The findings show that many organisations underestimate how chosen implementation strategies shape both immediate operational gains and the long-term development of organisational capabilities. To address these issues, the thesis makes several contributions. It describes four interrelated components central to managing multisite lean implementation and identifies four predominant types of implementation strategies — education, tool, pragmatic, and culture — each influencing organisational outcomes in distinct ways. The dynamic interplay and shifting among these implementation strategies are demonstrated to be essential in adapting to evolving implementation challenges and strategic priorities. Furthermore, an XPS capability framework is introduced, which elaborates programme actions to different problem areas encountered in corporate-level lean transformation. Six core XPS capabilities are identified, supporting companies to initiate, accelerate, and adapt their improvement efforts across global production networks. The research also advances theory by reconceptualising the role of XPS, not merely as a vehicle for diffusing operating values and improvement tools, but as a mechanism for deliberately redesigning the operations management system to a lean-based one. This positions the XPS as a dynamic mechanism through which investments in the programme accumulate as structural capital, providing the company with a competitive edge for future corporate-level transformations toward operational excellence. In addition, the thesis identifies and characterises several forms of ‘implementation waste’ unique to implementation in multisite contexts, providing both theoretical insight and actionable guidance. By highlighting these challenges and offering contextualised frameworks, this thesis contributes to the academic discourse on corporate lean management in an industrial production context, and effective realisation of global production operations strategy. It offers practical tools and concepts to guide practitioners in achieving more deliberate, flexible, and effective corporate lean management, ultimately supporting sustainable improvement across diverse industrial environments. 

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