The Integration of Lean Manufacturing and Lean Maintenance to Improve Production Efficiency

The lack of an implementation roadmap always deters companies from choosing lean manufacturing as its major management approach to achieve excellence; this paper proposes another improvement strategy to deliver manufacturing excellence, which is Lean maintenance. Many researchers have written about lean manufacturing, but lean maintenance is a new concept, which is few treated in research, lean maintenance is not a subset of lean manufacturing but it is a cardinal prerequisite for success as a lean manufacturer. Therefore, the aim of the current paper is to compare Lean Maintenance approach to Lean Manufacturing and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) and finally investigate the specific characteristics of the Lean Maintenance approach in order to ensure effective success of the implementation of this approach.