Lean Thinking for Competitive Advantage in the Era of Industry 4.0

The Covid-19 pandemic has adversely affected the business across the globe. One of the hardest hit segments from Covid-19 is the manufacturing sector. The manufacturing companies are continuously striving hard to search strategies for survival and growth in such a challenging business environment. Lean Thinking has proved to be a useful strategy for gaining Competitive Advantage in the era of industry 4.0. The need of the hour is to identify and eliminate the waste in existing business practices, introduce employee safety measures along with best hygiene and sanitization practices at workplace; revisit their sourcing strategies, review their crisis or emergency response plans, optimise and streamline e-commerce and distribution networks, evaluate supply chain strategy and make it more resilient, etc
However, the role of Lean Thinking in Manufacturing sector / service sector is still not well understood by the practitioners.