The Effect of Lean Kaizen Application on Student’s Satisfaction in Malaysian Higher Education Sector

Abstract

Lean has been applied in the manufacturing sector for many years now. However, Lean implementation in the education sector has been somewhat slow in comparison, especially in the academic area. This motivates the conduct of this study, which is to identify waste in one of the academic work processes by applying value steam mapping and other lean tools. An experimental study was conducted to examine the effect of Lean kaizen application in the course planning and delivery process on students’ satisfaction level at the end of a semester. The experimental study involved two groups of undergraduate students, one group with lean application and another group without lean application, from two universities in Malaysia. A questionnaire was used to collect the data totalling 205 respondents from University X and 201 respondents from University Y. The empirical results demonstrated that the use of Lean kaizen techniques did help to identify and reduce the waste by focusing on value adding activities. Furthermore, the finding of this study has showed that there is a significant difference in students’ satisfaction between a group with lean application and a group without lean application. The mean of satisfaction for the group with lean application is higher than the group without lean application. Thus, this study has confirmed that Lean kaizen can be successfully applied in the Higher Education Sector to improve the academic work processes. This study has also provided the opportunity and guideline to other universities to change for the better.

Date of Award	2016
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Zulf Khan (Supervisor) & Sarfraz Khan (Supervisor)