Lean and QRM: different or similar? A review of the literature

Abstract

Some approaches have emerged in order to increase companies’ performance in their operations.  Lean Manufacturing is among them, in virtue of its productivity improvement, as well as Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM), for its high-variety strategy. However, the literature has not elucidated yet how to use together these two approaches or whether they complement each other.  The aim of this article is to find similarities, differences, and complementarities of both approaches.  To achieve this, we used a literature review, classifying papers mainly by the type of approach and cited tools.  The main differences found were related to production systems and their performance indicators.  The principal similarities were in waste-reduction strategies, cell grouping and setup reduction.  The main complementarity were found in increasing flexibility from QRM to Lean in production as well as in supply chains.  Future research may empirically explore a combination of the two approaches.