Jenei István

István Jenei: Lean transformation of hospital processes – Structuring foreign and Hungarian experiences,
PhD Dissertation, Corvinus University of Budapest, Doctoral School in Business Administration
TPM, respectively, and of their interactions, on production performance. They review
19 literature items: “The empirical studies that we draw upon are studies in the last 10
years that have sufficient grounding in the literature and assessment of measurement
used in empirical analysis.” (Cua et al., 2001. p.676.). They divide the “components”
associated with each area into four parts: TQM-specific, JIT-specific (Lean), and TPM-
specific components and “common” ones. They sum up their findings in spreadsheet
format. Of the four categories, the TQM, JIT (Lean) and “common” components are
important for us here. These are shown in Column 3 of Table 1.
A look at the fields of the Table 1, shows that the analysis of Cua et al. (2001) of
the common and different components, respectively, of JIT and TQM rhymes in many
respects with the findings of a similar survey by Flynn et al. (1995). As far as these two
sources are concerned, not only the practices themselves (which are not presented in the
table), but also their category labels correspond to one another to a large extent. The
terminology of Shah –Ward (2007) is different, albeit the practices concerned are
remarkably similar. Surprisingly, Shah –Ward (2007) identify as lean management – in
addition to the components of JIT – also practices assigned to TQM by the other two
sources. This variance affirms that (i) there is no consensus in the technical literature
either as to the assessment of the various practices and (ii) Lean (lean management) is
developing, and its content keeps expanding (Hines et al., 2004).
According Hines et al. (2004), lean management as a first stage of the
identification of the system focused primarily on the production area and especially the
tools which organise the material flow (JIT, kanban) in the strict sense. The extension of
such solutions to without the company limits, e.g. to the suppliers, came in a later phase.
This is how we should interpret the inclusion of a supplier JIT among the JIT-specific
tools in a paper written in 2001. By and large the same applies to strategic planning,
included among the common components. This, too, is an instance of JIT/Lean
development, in the sense that the users increasingly recognise the strategic relevance of
the system, and its close relationship with strategy creation. The change in terminology,
namely that instead of making a distinction between JIT and TQM, the companies
which applied both started to call them, comprehensively, lean management, is probably
attributable to the same development. The underlying rationale is that all of these
components were typically present in the production systems of “Lean” Japanese
companies. Thus when the authors of “The Machine that Changed the World” (Womack
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