“Lean bundles within Jordanian manufacturing SMEs and their effect on business performance”

Maximizing customer value and minimizing waste have become the heart of the formulation of SMEs in the manufacturing sector of Jordan to survive in the new global marketplace. Therefore, lean manufacturing philosophy is used in SMEs to improve performance regarding quality, delivery, and costs to become efficiently competitive, thus accomplishing sustainable economic growth. The current study was designed to analyze the extent to which lean management bundles are adopted by SMEs manufacturing organizations in Jordan and the effect on their performance. Data were collected from 278 manufacturing SMEs in Jordan based on a structured questionnaire. The theoretical relationships were examined using structural equation modeling. The results show that Total Quality Management (TQM) and Human Resources Management (HRM) lean bundles are positively associated with manufacturing SMEs’ performance. The outcomes of this study may be considered as incentives for other practitioners and entrepreneurs of SMEs when implementing lean bundles by acknowledging the positive effect on their performance. Moreover, the findings of this study could be used in an internal checklist before and during the implementation of Lean Manufacturing (LM).


INTRODUCTION
As a response to the rapid technological development in the world, and to the market demands, firms of different sizes and from various sectors need to improve their product quality, provide faster delivery, and lower the costs to improve the efficiency of performance ( Looking at it from a globalization standpoint, most studies have noted that SMEs are a source for improving competitiveness and contributors to increasing economic wealth (Prasanna & Vinodh, 2013;Hu, Mason, Williams, & Found, 2015). SMEs are susceptible to the ever-changing world of business and it's increasingly demanding customers (Sajan, Shalij, Ramesh, & Biju, 2017). Productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, and delivery are problems, which plague SMEs these days. To overcome these problems, SMEs have to tackle waste to meet quality requirements and delivery times, among other things, which can be achieved through the main characteristics of lean philosophy (Thanki & Thakkar, 2019).
The issues related to LM philosophy have been a common research theme in the literature review for well over two decades, where SMEs research has been mostly conducted in developed countries. The majority of research about the lean implication in the SMEs sector has been carried out in Western settings (Hu et al., 2015). This strategy has received less attention and still relatively unheard of in developing countries (Albliwi, Antony, Arshed, & Ghadge, 2017; AL-Najem, Dhakal, Labib, & Bennett, 2013; Shrafat & Ismail, 2019). Besides, little research has been done showing the significance of lean bundles on the performance of SMEs from a developing country's perspective, particularly in the Middle East region. Furthermore, the researcher noticed a lack of empirical investigations on the use of lean bundles within Jordanian manufacturing SMEs, which is the main interest of this study.
Distinguishing that lean bundles' implementation in manufacturing SMEs contributes to the performance and existence of such a sector in Jordan is an important phase in managing and avoiding the failure of this vital sector in Jordan. This study could be used as a dependable reference guide to researchers about SMEs that focus on LM activities. Also, the importance of the present research is that it could be used as a model and guide to those aiming to study lean bundles in other developing market economies.
Given this, the key research question is proposed: Is there a significant influence of lean bundles on the performance of manufacturing SMEs in Jordan?
Thus, the sub-questions are formulated as follows: 1. Do JIT bundles have a significant and positive influence on the performance of Jordanian SMEs in the manufacturing sector?
2. Do HRM bundles have a significant and positive influence on the performance of Jordanian SMEs in the manufacturing sector?
3. Do TQM bundles have a significant and positive influence on the performance of Jordanian SMEs in the manufacturing sector?
This study is divided into six sections. After the introduction, the next section describes the extant literature on LM application in general, and within SMEs in particular, the research then moves on to the literature that highlights the implementation of LM at manufacturing SMEs in Jordan. The conceptual framework and the development of the research hypotheses are discussed in section 2. The research methodology employed in this study is discussed in section 3. Next, the analysis and discussion of the main research findings, implications, and limitations of the study, as well as some suggestions for further research, are discussed in sections 4 and 5. The conclusions are discussed in final section.

Lean application in SMEs
SMEs have always been thought of as the mainstay of emerging markets throughout the world as they considerably add to their economic growth regarding employment creation, innovation, and volume of manufacturing production (Hu et  Large firms rely on a perfect network of suppliers; most of them are SMEs (Knol et al., 2019). According to Sahoo and Yadav (2018), the Indian government realized the significance of manufacturing as a competitive weapon. Thus, they found that LM is considered competitive for SMEs since it contributes to decreasing manufacturing costs with better-quality process flows and reducing the time of engineering.
Manufacturers have implemented various LM practices, tools, and techniques to create the best promising values and decrease non-value added activities. However, for many organizations, this is a complex and difficult task to accomplish effectively. Nevertheless, manufacturing SMEs struggle to improve enhancement routines and implement lean bundles. In the context of SMEs, LM initiatives pose further challenges (Mohammad & Oduoza, 2019). With some manufacturers, lean practices are not applied correctly due to internal issues such as their dearth of information and understanding of lean, local culture, and business skills (Sahoo & Yadav, 2018). A majority of manufacturing companies that have applied LM have their own unique way of assessing lean practices. It is certainly true that SMEs have unique features and specific success standards when it comes to lean application, which can vary quite a bit from large ones' arrangements.
Most developing countries agree that there are simply not enough data on this subject and that the implementation of LM has been restricted.
Regardless of the benefits that can be derived, SMEs in developing countries, such as Asia and the Middle East regions, still lack the will to implement lean bundles. There is still a shortage in the studies that tackle the degree of lean implementation, and how to promote for its use in manufacturing SMEs sector (Hu et al., 2015;Psomas et al., 2018). Added to that is the lack of awareness of the issues related to lean implementation in manufacturing SMEs in contrast to large enterprises. The current study would try to fill in this gap by overcoming these challenges.
Because of the Jordanian government's manufacturing policies, manufacturing industries in the country are anticipating high levels of economic growth and competitiveness; moreover, Jordan is also emerging as one of the Middle East's most preferred manufacturing destinations (Thanki & Thakkar, 2019). Based on the statistics department's report in Jordan, the industrial institutions in Jordan for the year 2017 is almost 17,000, and about 98% of them are small and medium enterprises. This sector's importance lies in the large number of employees who are continuously being hired in the manufacturing SMEs sector in Jordan (DOS, 2020).
Despite this opportunity for growth in Jordan's manufacturing sector, other problems such as innovation, sustainability, and cost reduction need urgent attention. In developing countries like Jordan, the manufacturing sectors face various obstacles and opportunities, some of which are ubiquitous to all countries, others only found in developing countries, and it is the challenges faced by the latter that need to be addressed by manufacturers. This research seeks to recognize the most effectively adopted lean bundles in developed countries and decide whether or not they can be validly and significantly used in the same way in developing countries.
One of the highest growth sectors in Jordan is manufacturing; thus, manufacturing SMEs have a golden opportunity to come out of the shadows and conquer the global market. However, to do so, Jordanian manufacturers need to implement quality programs that will allow them to be more competitive in the international marketplace. Fierce challenges with competition have motivated several SMEs to implement lean tools to improve their firms' efficacy and effectiveness (

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT
Lean has been globally used in different enterprises to develop both performance and competitive advantages (Ramadas & Satish, 2017). However, when it comes to obtaining the performance benefits that manufacturers get when they implement the lean system, some manufacturers are still skeptical. Therefore, the conclusions were not consistent regarding lean's impact on performance.
Regarding any relationships between the degree of lean practices' use and operational consequences, Bonavia and Marin (2006)  Based on the literature review, this research implements a conceptual framework and a set of hypotheses. Figure 1 illustrates the study framework used to clarify the influence of the lean bundles on SMEs' performance. Therefore, the author hypothesizes that synchronized implementation of multiple aspects of lean bundles is positively associated with SMEs' performance in the manufacturing sector. Thus, the main hypotheses are formulated as follows:  To precisely evaluate the extent of lean implementation in manufacturing SMEs, five items for JIT, five items for TQM, five items for HRM, and four items for SMEs performance were included in the survey. All of the lean bundles were rated on a five-point Likert scale, which ranged from "strongly disagree" (1) to "strongly agree" (5). Four items regarding performance are measured on a five-point Likert scale ranging from "much worse" to "much better". Questionnaires rated with fivepoint Likert scale are easy to answer and clear (Sajan et al., 2017). Furthermore, the SEM analysis was achieved using AMOS software.
The questionnaire consisted of three parts. The first part included the organization's profile and personal information of the respondents. The second looks at the implementation of lean bundles. Finally, the third was devoted to the operations of the SMEs. In total, 400 questionnaires were dis-tributed to SMEs owners/managers. After an initial review of 278 returned and completed questionnaires, it was deemed that questionnaires are suitable for statistical processing, a response rate of 69.5 percent, which was considered satisfactory for subsequent analysis. Table 1 shows that, concerning the demographic profile of the respondents and the descriptive data of their organizations, a majority of respondents (75.6%) were between 20 and 55 years. As they are more interested in growth, younger owners/managers are more inclined to participate in business development activities by looking for different ways to both raise the value and quality of their products and satisfy the needs of their customers at the same time. Around 71.95% of the total number of managers as respondents has more than ten years of working experience in manufacturing SMEs. Therefore, the accuracy and originality of the information have been achieved. All the manufacturing SMEs as respondents employ less than 250 employees. It is believed that, by achieving this response rate, the SMEs were well represented.

Sample characteristics
The participants are all highly educated and experienced. Better educated managers seem to be more proactive and concerned with the LM program in their organizations; therefore, they are willing to objectively assess the advantages of the lean concept to improve the performance of their organizations. Manufacturing companies from health and personal care, food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles and garments, and furniture sectors are involved in this research. Because the responses from different sectors of SMEs were used, the results can be generalized to a large degree through diverse SMEs of various products. It was critical to choose respondents with the necessary knowledge and experience and who were directly involved through LM implementation within their organizations. Hence, around (39.57%) of the respondents were from quality departments, (35.97%) from the senior executive managers, while (24.46%) were from the departmental managers and others.

Validity and reliability
The results of both reliability and validity analysis of construct tools are presented in Table  2. Using Cronbach's α, the internal consistency reliability of all constructs can be measured. According to the results, Cronbach's alpha value for four constructs is above the threshold value of 0.6, which shows satisfactory internal consistency reliability of all proportions (Sekaran & Bougie, 2016).
Through confirmatory factor analysis and correlation analysis, Table 2 shows that all the results are appreciably well above the recommended value since all items are loaded on their principal construct. With the lowest value being 0.791, it is the condition for convergent validity. Statistically significant loading of all items, which is higher than the recommended value of 0.7, is also the condition for composite reliabilities (CR) (Gefen et al., 2000). As the average variance extracted (AVE) is more than 0.50, and the square root of AVE is larger than each correlation coefficient, discriminant validity can be approved since it is consistent with the threshold values suggested by Fornell and Larcker (1981).
To examine the unidimensionality of the lean practices that underwent the principal component analysis with varimax rotation, Table 2 shows the results. Three higher-level constructs have been produced by using the principal component analysis. These are TQM (five scales), HRM (five scales), and JIT (five scales). Four dimensions of manufacturing SMEs performance also underwent the principal component analysis. A single higher-level construct of performance has also been produced according to the principal component analysis, which is valid and reliable. The correlation between three lean bundles and manufacturing SMEs performance were examined using Pearson's correlation analysis.
According to the results in Table 3, the correlation coefficients for the variables under investigation were reasonably high between (.718) and (.560).

Hypotheses testing results
The structural model established by path diagram is presented in Figure 2.  Hu and Bentler (1999), the model can be accepted.
The outcomes of the SEM with the standardized coefficients and t-values are shown in Figure 2 and Table 4. This study fundamentally emphasizes the effect of lean bundles on the performance of the Jordanian manufacturing SMEs, which plays a significant role in Jordanian economic development. The current study has found a positive relationship between TQM and HRM bundles and SMEs performance.

DISCUSSION
The outcomes of this study show that the most significant lean bundles were found to be TQM. The findings of this study suggest that the majority of manufacturing SMEs must have TQM capabilities, as it can afford to enhance their business reputation when it comes to product and service quality that meet the customer's needs and allow them to effectively and efficiently compete with their rivals, Despite the importance of JIT, the skepticism regarding the benefits of performance, which are obtainable from implementing JIT bundles, can be attributed to the fact that the majority of manufacturing SMEs in Jordan do not implement the modern techniques, which has been used in inventory control according to the high cost of implementing and maintaining these systems despite its advantages for SMEs. One explanation for these findings is that businesses with larger firm size and unit revenues are most apt to be more experienced in modern technology and innovations for using lean practices that may enhance their performance (Al-Hyari et al., 2016). This result is consistent with Muchaendepi et al. (2019) that SMEs adopting inventory analysis techniques lag behind larger organizations since the cost of applying and keeping the system is comparatively high. Jordan is a small country with limited natural resources; Jordanian SMEs import a large amount of their material from the international market. This implies a higher risk of costly production delays because of late arrival due to the increasing cost of transportation, which is a benefit for local providers. Also, the Jordanian market is not widely spread within its region since it is relatively considered small.

Figure 2. Hypotheses testing results
Given that SMEs are considerably globally contributing to the manufacturing economy, it can be supposed that SMEs' quick implementation of lean bundles has become a significant factor in its success. In the current turbulent business environment, manufacturing SMEs need never-ending enhancement and more effectual techniques to meet the customer's needs from products or services. Cost minimization without affecting the quality has to be the target for all manufacturing SMEs to continue in this competitive international economy and improve their competitive advantage over their competitors by using the LM philosophy as a road map (Sahoo & Yadav, 2018).
This study makes a few contributions to the current body of knowledge since the results are useful for other researchers, scholars, and practitioners. The study on lean bundles has received limited care, particularly for developing countries like Jordan. Therefore, the results of this study have reinforced the state-of-the-art in this area. Also, this work is expected to help researchers, academics, practitioners, and experts in lean manufacturing at the Jordanian SMEs sector in planning for a successful lean transformation. The results confirm the findings of previous research that the LM program is appropriate both in developed and developing economies. These results comply with several studies that showed the same results, e.g., Shrafat  The present study results are limited to Jordanian manufacturing SMEs, which could not be generalized for other countries or other sectors. Therefore, they could be recommended for further research to be performed in other countries and other sectors.
The study's sample size was relatively small (28) to examine the influencing relationships of the se- lected constructs. So, it is suggested to statistically validate the influencing relations with large sample size. Moreover, the study was cross-sectional; hence, a longitudinal study must be performed to reinforce the findings. There might be other lean practices and bundles, which can affect the operations of manufacturing SMEs. Thus, this study might be extended to verify other lean bundles and practices that might influence SMEs performance; also, the performance measure is subjective, which is based on the perception of the respondents. Future research should consider other dimensions of performance, such as objective and sustainable performance.

CONCLUSION
As SMEs are the cornerstone of the Jordanian economy, the capability of SMEs to be active in both local and global markets greatly influences the long-term competitiveness of Jordan. Subsequently, Jordanian government should support this important sector to keep and improve its role in developing the Jordanian economy by investing a large amount of money in promotion, embark on a LM program to enhance organizational performance, which, as a result, will improve Jordan's economic performance. More focus is needed by the top management of Jordanian manufacturing SMEs to consult the same field's specialists and follow the successful benchmarks of LM that had been used in other firms to improve its implementation level and sustainability.
Also, it is recommended that the current production and operation approaches be changed using contemporary techniques to decrease costs. Lean bundles can lead to the reduction of manufacturing costs, and subsequently, develop the production quality and improvement of new products at its best price. SMEs are required to develop themselves by showing effective and more dedicated leadership and management commitment, enhancing their staff's skills and expertise, and exhibiting a conducive organizational culture to guarantee the successful implementation of lean philosophy in their organizations.