Lean manufacturing: a perspective of lean suppliers

The main thrust of this paper empirically examines the connection between lean production and various aspects of the logistics system. This paper performs a comparison analysis to find whether significant performance/practice differences exist between lean suppliers and non‐lean suppliers. The research findings indicate that, even given the same organizational constraints and resources, lean suppliers gain significant competitive advantages over non‐lean suppliers in production systems, distribution systems, information communications, containerization, transportation systems, customer‐supplier relationships, and on‐time staging/delivery performance.