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The purpose of this paper is to understand how a continuous improvement (CI) approach like lean production (LP) integration is affected by dynamic conditions and to propose how LP integration can be adaptable to dynamic conditions.

A longitudinal case study has been conducted in which data were collected through participative observations, observations, documents and an in-depth semi-structured interview.

The adaptability is related to the maturity level of the LP integration, where more mature organisations are better equipped to deal with the challenges occurring due to their learning and experimentation capabilities. The main problem is that the LP integration needs to be adapted, like compromising with just-in-time. This creates challenges to more immature organisations; they do not seem to be able to adapt the LP integration since the skills are lacking.

The research limitations are associated with the research design and therefore might limit generalisation of the context studied.

The management needs to stay focused on the LP integration to continue building CI capability. There is a need to adapt the LP concept, which includes assessing how proposed changes and the LP concept interact in order to make them reinforce each other. This involves creating guidelines concerning adaptation and facilitating a transition from mainly single-loop learning to double-loop learning.

This paper contributes by describing challenges that have an impact on LP integration and related organisational adaptability under dynamic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of paradoxes, underlying tensions and potential management strategies when integrating digital technologies into existing lean-based production systems (LPSs), with the aim of achieving synergies and fostering the development of production systems.

This study adopts a collaborative management research (CMR) approach to identify patterns of organisational tensions and paradoxes and explore management strategies to overcome them. The data were collected through interviews and focus group interviews with experts on lean and/or digital technologies from the companies, from documents and from workshops with the in-case researchers.

The findings of this paper provide insights into the salient organisational paradoxes embraced in the integration of digital technologies in LPS by identifying different aspects of the performing, organising, learning and belonging paradoxes. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate the intricacies and relatedness between different paradoxes and their resolutions, and more specifically, how a resolution strategy adopted to manage one paradox might unintentionally generate new tensions. This, in turn, calls for either re-contextualising actions to counteract the drift or the adoption of new resolution strategies.

This paper adds perspective to operations management (OM) research through the use of paradox theory, and we (1) provide a fine-grained perspective on why integration sometimes “fails” and label the forces of internal drift as mechanisms of imbalances and (2) provide detailed insights into how different management and resolution strategies are adopted, especially by identifying re-contextualising actions as a key to rebalancing organisational paradoxes in favour of the integration of digital technologies in LPSs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how holistic improvement work can be organized and what challenges can be observed in the process of adopting a holistic perspective on production system improvement.

A qualitative case study and a questionnaire have been carried out. Data for the case study has been collected through semi-structured interviews, archived documents and participatory observations. The questionnaire was done in order to increase the generalizability of the findings from the case study and further validate the conclusions.

The improvement work at the case company is organized as a continuous improvement approach in a Lean Production system in the form of a company-specific production system (XPS), in which two other improvement approaches are incorporated. Some of the identified challenges are: the establishment of a holistic perspective on improvement opportunities; the development of a process to update the production strategy; the continuous update of the Operational Management System during the XPS implementation; aggregating measures for the improvement work and measuring the effect of improvement work.

As the current case study is limited to one case company, future research is interested in expanding to other production systems contexts for further validation.

The present study offers an increased understanding of the integration difficulties of improvement work that many production companies face regarding operational effectiveness, and based on the findings, some implications for management are presented.