پیاده سازی ناب در شرکت های تولیدی در عربستان سعودی: جنبه های فرهنگ سازمانی Lean implementation within manufacturing SMEs in Saudi Arabia: Organizational culture aspects

1. Introduction Implementing Lean into manufacturing within Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) within Saudi Arabia faces difficulties(Karim et al., 2011). Organizational Culture (OC) is one of the most important factors to focus on to facilitate the implementation of Lean within Saudi Arabian manufacturing (Karim and Arif‐Uz‐Zaman, 2013). Moreover, the culture of an organisation plays a vital role for managers facing the challenge to change that culture (Graham-jones and Muhareb, 2015). It is necessary to have a feasible Lean framework to assist SMEs to successfully implement Lean (Pingyu and Yu, 2010).in addition, the main challenge faced SMEs in KSA was changing OC and peoples’ mind-set (Alkhoraif, 2016; Albliwi et al., 2017; Alkhoraif and Mclaughlin, 2017). Studies have shown that many researchers are in agreement that an Organizational culture which does not support Lean is a large reason for the failure of successful Lean Implementation, (Munene, 1995; MacDuffie and Helper, 1997; Dixon, 1999; Brown, Willis and Prussia, 2000; Womack, J., & Jones, 2003; Schonberger, 2007). For the purpose of this paper SMEs refer to organisations with fewer than 250 employees where European Commission definition adopted, (European Commission ,2011) Saudi Arabian government as part of its vision from now to the year 2030, to improve and find quality solutions for SMEs. The objective of these manufacturing firms is to develop, be competitive and to increase its contributions of the Gross Domestic Products (GDP) from 20% to 60%, (Government, 2015). In addition, the intention is to increase the private sectors GDP contributions from 40% to 65% by raising the share of non-oil exports from 16% to 50% (ibid). It is important to clarify that the GDP of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) was estimated at Saudi Riyal (SR) 608 billion in 2015 – 2016 ($ 162.133 billion) (Finance, 2015). The exploring and gauging will be designed for SMEs, but it will be built at a generic scale to suit other cases as well. The article should have as few size constraints as possible, and to create it there will be a need to discover as many inhibiting factors as possible. These inhibiting factors, and indeed those factors that encourage this behaviour can be graphically displayed and tabulated, allowing deeper analysis of each, to find its roots and, where necessary, remove it from the company culture (Hietschold et al.,2014) . In addition to that, many factors explain why this research was conceived:  The success of Lean implementation will not just be based on applications, tools and techniques, but also on the top managements’ involvement, leadership and Organizational culture (Jadhav , et al., 2014).  Culture is the key factor to making the changes for Lean implementation (Pakdil and Leonard, 2015).  Lack of research regarding the critical factor of Organizational culture related to Lean implementation (Pakdil and Leonard, 2015).  Lack of knowledge and difficulties in implementing Lean in the Middle Eastern and Gulf countries, but also and increasing concern of Lean implementation in SMEs, (Al-najem, 2014).