Help chain in companies undergoing a lean implementation: The impact of critical success factors on quality and efficiency performance

The purpose of this paper is to propose an instrument for assessing the relationships between the critical success factors (CSFs) that promote help chain, providing means to enhance overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and quality performance in companies undergoing a lean implementation.

The aforementioned relationships were determined and validated through a survey carried out with 50 Brazilian manufacturers. The authors, thus, provide an empirically validated instrument for assessing help chain CSFs and their impact on key operational performance indicators with no parallel in the existing literature. Quality (incidence of scrap and rework in manufacturing processes) and OEE (overall equipment effectiveness measured in percentage) were chosen as performance indicators because of their recognized relevance in previous research related to help chain approach.

The results of this paper show that the size of the company and CSFs have a significant relationship with quality. However, for OEE, time of lean implementation seems to be significantly important to predict its performance.

Identifying relevant relationships between CSFs and performance indicators may contribute to specify the context in which problems are expected to occur. With that knowledge, manufacturers will be able to emphasize the development of such factors that tend to improve their operational performance. Therefore, possible correlations are investigated to obtain a clearer comprehension around the subject and enable a better understating over the boundary conditions that surround the problem.