Are Lean, World Class Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 are related?
Are Lean, World Class Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 are related?
Purpose: The purpose of this research is to present the relationships between the Lean Manufacturing methodology, the World-Class Manufacturing method and the practices of industry 4.0, showing how these actors have been discussed in literature, mainly in terms of gains and improvements for organizations.
Design/methodology/approach: The search strategy was extracting data from Web of Science and Scopus databases using the following keywords: “lean”, “lean production”, “lean manufacturing”, “WCM”, “world-class manufacturing”, “world class business” and “industry 4.0”. No restrictions of subject area were defined. For data analysis, bibliometric analysis was carried out using VOSviewer (version 1.6.9) and NetDraw (version 2.158) software.
Findings: This review reveals that studies related to Industry 4.0, World-Class Manufacturing, lean and Industry 4.0 and structured processes have the highest number of publications. Papers that bring the link between Lean and World-Class Manufacturing, and World-Class Manufacturing and Industry 4.0, are few, and 92% of them were published from 2018 onwards. There are no publications carried out on the three proposed topics as a set: Lean, World-Class Manufacturing and Industry practices
4.0. In the network analyses, three keyword clusters was found: technology, manufacturing and strategy.
Originality: There is no significant evidence in the literature that proves that the intense use of technologies associated with World-Class Manufacturing is related to greater efficiency in processes.
Paper type: Literature Review
Bibliometric analysis, World-Class Manufacturing, Industry 4.0 practices, Operations management.
