Demystifying the Role of Leanness, Agility, Innovativeness, and Sustainability in Manufacturing Industries: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Abstract

This paper aims to review various prevalent manufacturing practices, such as leanness, agility, innovativeness, and sustainability in industries. This paper further investigates the scope of interconnections between them and explores various gaps that can be used for future research. An all-inclusive systematic review of 106 research papers was done during a time frame from 1991-2020 that considered numerous aspects, such as research tools and techniques used, data gathering approaches applied (empirical, case study, and literature review studies), and further data assortment techniques were also applied based on inquiry approach of various research methodologies (qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-method approach). This research paper also considered characteristics, such as country of origin, targeted demography, objectives, and publication timeline. Notably, leanness, agility, innovativeness, sustainability, performance measurement, and MSMEs are well studied and analyzed in prior studies. Moreover, research findings highlighted the popularity of these practices in large-scale industries. However, very little literature supports the acceptance of these practices in manufacturing MSMEs. Moreover, the holistic effect of these practices and their interrelationship is an important aspect that has been ignored in previous studies, so there is an urge for adequate attention towards the extensive literature review in this domain. This literature review only considered manufacturing industries and excluded the service industries. Notably, this literature review enlightens the path and shows future directions for research to develop efficient, effective, and sustainable manufacturing practices for manufacturing industries. The inferences from this study may enlighten a new path for future studies related to manufacturing MSMEs.