TABLE OF CONTENTS The purpose of this study was to investigate and compare the impact of a lean manufacturing program upon various internal and external operational performance measures, as reported by a number of differing management accounting methods. Previous chapters introduced the focus of the research, provided a review of the existing literature surrounding the issues researched, described the experimental design and research tools employed, and reviewed the results in terms of the research questions at the center of this study. This chapter will provide a summary of the research findings. In addition, limitations of the models and evaluation methods will be discussed as well as directions for future research.
The findings in this study demonstrate the significance of the impact on two of the key external performance measures used by manufacturing firms throughout the United States and the United Kingdom. In addition, the impact on the internal measure of shipping performance is also quantified and evaluated. A summary of the results of the testing of the research questions presented in Chapter 2 of this document is shown in Table 5.1. The findings contained within this document pertain to an operation with the following characteristics:
A repetitive manufacturing environment that follows a build-to-stock model.
Multiple manufacturing cells dedicated to families of products.
Manufacturing routings that contain 15 to 20 processing steps.
Processing times that are normally distributed with a standard deviation of 10 to 20 percent of the mean processing time, N[ ?
