A Literature Review on the Effect of Lean and Sustainability on Quality Management Systems for SMEs

The globalized and competitive market has required constant efforts of organizations, encouraging them to develop more sophisticated strategies to achieve continuous improvement and thus satisfy the fast-changing need of customers and also to survive in the competitive market. The quality management systems (QMS) based on the ISO 9001 standard encourage organizations to adopt various forms of improvement to consistently enhance its overall performance, to better be able to meet customer and other stakeholder requirements, as well as to address their future needs and expectations. Small and medium-sized enterprises and additionally huge organizations have been compelled to include themselves in the quality development, all the time connected with the execution of the ISO 9001 standard. Lean manufacturing (LM) ensures waste elimination every aspect of manufacturing, including product design and customer relations can help provide the process improvements that are required by the ISO 9001 QMS. In recent years, sustainability as a competitive priority has entered the agenda of manufacturing organisations with an emphasis on increasing competitiveness by improving economic, environmental and social performances. So by the integration of Lean and Sustainability with ISO 9001 QMS envisages the SMEs a balanced approach thereby avoiding many priorities arising from different forums. This paper discusses a lean and sustainable integrated quality management system which may help these organizations to improve its manufacturing process, by eliminating waste and achieving competitive advantages along with quality improvement.