Handbook of Management Scales/Customer involvement

Customer involvement (alpha > 0.7; composite reliability = 0.85; average variance extracted = 0.55)

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 focusing on a firm’s customers and their needs.

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.

• We frequently are in close contact with our customers.
• Our customers give us feedback on quality and delivery performance.
• Our customers are actively involved in current and future product offerings.
• Our customers are directly involved in current and future product offerings.
• Our customers frequently share current and future demand information with key marketing department.

Source

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

Customer involvement (alpha = 0.672)

Items

• We are frequently in close contact with customers.
• Our customers seldom visit our plant. (not used in Flynn/Flynn 1999)
• Our customers give us feedback on quality and delivery performance.
• Our customers are actively involved in the product design process.
• We strive to be highly responsive to our customers' needs.
• We regularly survey our customers' requirements.

Source

• Morita/Flynn (1997): The linkage among management systems, practices and behaviour in successful manufacturing strategy. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, Vol. 17, No. 10, pp. 967-993.
• Flynn/Flynn (1999): Information-Processing Alternatives for Coping with Manufacturing Environment Complexity. Decision Sciences, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 1021-1052.