**2. Literature review**

Lean is a combination of principles, practices, tools, and techniques with an aim to improve safety quality, cost, delivery, productivity and improvement by eliminating non-value adding steps. Further, lean is a continuous improvement initiative with an intent to implement business processes that with minimal waste and reduced lead times [4]. While elimination of wastes and direct implication on value perceived by the customer are heavily promoted, most of the success stories in Lean originates from Japan, while many of the failure stories finds their way from rest of the world [5].

With the decision of an organization to initiate the lean process comes the challenge of bringing about the change in the thought process of employees and work culture [6]. This is because lean is a way of working towards the elimination of waste across organization, thus a transition of behavior and methodology that may be deeply rooted within an organization is required. When an organization chooses to go lean, it hunts for waste across system, thus earns the distinction of being a socio-techno intervention.

A trust-based work culture is a precondition for lean intervention as leaning raises the anxiety of job loss in employees. The improvement process must be recognized as benefiting both the company and the employees. The ultimate responsibility for the outcome rests with the management. Thus, studies highlight that the major roadblock in successful implementation of lean manufacturing that lead to improvement in production effectiveness is the hesitation of management to empower employees. Ahuja and Khamba studies also share the same viewpoint that the rigid bureaucratic structures of the organizations are impeding empowerment of the employees. Lack of employee involvement in the overall implementation can lead either to their failure or partial implementation of these systems. Based on the above discussion, the following arguments has been formulated [7].

Unsuccessful implementation of lean manufacturing techniques is caused by employees' reluctance, lack of training and ethical education, and lack of follow up by the officials in the organization [8]. The purpose behind training and retraining of employees is to develop multi skills that could help them work more diligently, enthusiastically, independently and responsibly [9].

It is important to identify the causes for failure and understand their reasons and implications to assure a minimum probability of success in subsequent ventures with Lean [10]. The barriers to lean implementation can be grouped into the following ten broad areas by characteristics: organizational culture, knowledge, management, conflict, resources, technology, finance, employees, customers, and past experience [11]. Most of the occasions, a failure in Lean implementation is being attributed to lack of knowledge in lean, impatience and ignorance of the benefits being reaped by a cross section of companies leading jeopardizing the implementation at different stages. Isolated implementations as well cannot bring sustainable developments in performance even if the method is Lean [12]. Using the know-how on Lean in appropriate circumstances in applicable industries will reap better rewards than a mass application [13].
