Handbook of Management Scales/Continuous flow

Continuous flow (alpha > 0.7; composite reliability = 0.75; average variance extracted = 0.45)

Description

The research takes a step toward clarifying the concept of lean production and develops and validates a multi-dimensional measure of lean production. The 10 distinct dimensions of a lean system are continuous flow, customer involvement, employee involvement, JIT delivery by suppliers, pull, set up time reduction, statistical process control, supplier development, supplier feedback, and total productive/preventive maintenance.

Definition

Lean production is an integrated socio-technical system whose main objective is to eliminate waste by concurrently reducing or minimizing supplier, customer, and internal variability. This dimension of lean production is about establishing mechanisms that enable and ease the continuous flow of products.

Items

Please indicate the extent of implementation of each of the following practices in your plant. (1) no implementation; (2) little implementation; (3) some implementation; (4) extensive implementation; (5) complete implementation.

• Products are classified into groups with similar processing requirements.
• Products are classified into groups with similar routing requirements.
• Equipment is grouped to produce a continuous flow of families of products.
• Families of products determine our factory layout.

Source

• Shah/Ward (2007): Defining and developing measures of lean production. Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 785-805.

Comments

Average variance extracted is too low. Some items appear to be formative rather than reflective.