ABSTRACT
During recent years the virtues of lean production and just-in-time methods have been forcefully extolled in the management literature. These expressions typically function as umbrella terms for a package of management practices found in their purest form amongst the major Japanese manufacturers. Interest in these methods has been fuelled by the large performance gaps which apparently exist between Japanese manufacturers and their western counterparts in terms of productivity, quality and other measures of manufacturing performance (Parnaby 1987; Womack et al. 1990; Andersen Consulting 1993).
