Lean implementation in non‐repetitive companies: a survey and analysis

With the recent impressive growth of emerging countries, western companies have been compelled to strengthen their capability to customise products efficiently. Implementing Lean might be a solution for achieving such efficiency. In this paper, after presenting a review of the main characteristics of non‐repetitive companies, we will depict the main problems and highlight several solutions for implementing Lean in the context of non‐repetitive companies. This is relevant, as implementing Lean in non‐repetitive companies might not be straightforward due to the notable differences between such companies and the high volume companies in which Lean has originally been proposed. The outcomes of this paper come mostly from the analysis of past literature and thus collect the advances of research in such a novel ambit of the Lean implementation.