The impact of lean practices on inventory turnover

Lean manufacturing (LM) is currently enjoying its second heyday. Companies in several industries are implementing lean practices to keep pace with the competition and achieve better results. In this article, we will concentrate on how companies can improve their inventory turnover performance through the use of lean practices. According to our main proposition, firms that widely apply lean practices have higher inventory turnover than those that do not rely on LM. However, there may be significant differences in inventory turnover even among lean manufacturers depending on their contingencies. Therefore, we also investigate how various contingency factors (production systems, order types, product types) influence the inventory turnover of lean manufacturers. We use cluster and correlation analysis to separate manufacturers based on the extent of their leanness and to examine the effect of contingencies. We acquired the data from the International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) in ISIC sectors 28-35. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.