Co-authored by Prof (Dr) Kalyana C Chejarla (PGPX 2011), Assistant Professor at the Institute of Management Technology, Hyderabad. His areas of interest are operations, logistics and supply chain management, lean and quality management, business process management and decision making. Before moving into academics in 2014, he has worked for about 18 years in the supply chain domain at globally renowned organizations such as Tata Motors, HCL Technologies, Tata Consultancy Services and Dell International Services. During his corporate stint, he dealt extensively with customers in US, UK and Japan.

This book provides a step-by-step guide to implementing lean at SMEs using an approach that has been tested and fine-tuned at over a hundred organizations across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The book approaches Lean through an implementation project cycle flow and enables the reader to understand the imperative for Lean, how to diagnose current operations, how to plan and deploy Lean and shows a path for long-term sustenance.

Diverse situations such as meeting the demand fluctuations, designing a facility, or improving profit margin etc. are included in the case studies from multiple sectors, to ensure that every reader finds a situation similar to their organizational situation. While the publicly available literature on lean offers a large collection of tools and techniques, given each organization’s unique context, the choice of the right sequence of tools differ. The book offers guidelines in terms of which solutions work in which context, backed by real cases, which is a big help to the resource constrained SMEs. This book is an equally good resource for the organizations that have already implemented lean, as it provides realistic pointers about sustaining, tackling supply chain uncertainties and going beyond Lean by integrating emerging technologies and management principles. It is an excellent resource for students and researchers studying this area and for corporates, professionals and industry watchers.