Performance evaluation of lean production based on balanced score card method using ANP and SIR: a case from Iranian home appliance industry

Lean production is a productive philosophy with systematic perspective which takes steps toward eliminating waste materials by applying continual improvement in the sophisticated business processes. Appropriate implementation of this philosophy results in significant changes within a business. Despite the ample efforts devoted to lean production’s evaluation and implementation, this system’s efficient evaluation and implementation are still experiencing countless issues, which seem to be due to absence of a comprehensive model for examining and evaluating lean production within manufacturing companies. Having knowledge of the companies’ performance status, provides us with the possibilities of discovering weakness and strengths, allowing lead strategic managers to have higher performance comparing to their competitors by allocating more volume of market share to themselves. Balanced score card is an important management system which it will be explained using the following four dimensions: management system, exclusive reliance on financial criteria is incomplete and defective. This paper aims at performance evaluation of lean production using balanced score card (BSC), analytic network process (ANP) and inferiority and superiority based ranking (SIR) approaches where, four dimensions have been considered including financial performance, customer, internal business processes and innovation and learning. The expert questionnaire was used to evaluate lean production’s performance based on BSC, DEMATEL survey—for recognizing element’s internal relationships—and TOPSIS survey—for evaluating leanness of production line. To aid us in ranking the production line, data analysis was completed based on Super Decision and Visual PROMETHEE where, the fourth production line with total score of 0.77 stood in the first order, meaning the internal operations with the least level of cost which proves its leanness. The first and sixth line were placed in next ranks with total score of 0.72 and 0.36 which demonstrates leanness level respectively.