Handbook of Management Scales/Supplier feedback

Description
The research takes a step toward clarifying the concept of lean production and develops and validates a multi-dimensional measure of lean production. The 10 distinct dimensions of a lean system are continuous flow, customer involvement, employee involvement, JIT delivery by suppliers, pull, set up time reduction, statistical process control, supplier development, supplier feedback, and total productive/preventive maintenance.

Definition
Lean production is an integrated socio-technical system whose main objective is to eliminate waste by concurrently reducing or minimizing supplier, customer, and internal variability. This dimension of lean production is about providing regular feedback to suppliers about their performance.

Items
Please indicate the extent of implementation of each of the following practices in your plant. (1) no implementation; (2) little implementation; (3) some implementation; (4) extensive implementation; (5) complete implementation.


 * We frequently are in close contact with our suppliers.
 * We give our suppliers feedback on quality and delivery performance.
 * We strive to establish long-term relationship with our suppliers.

Source

 * Shah/Ward (2007): Deﬁning and developing measures of lean production. Journal of Operations Management, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 785-805.

Comments
Only the second item is about feedback rather than relationship. It is therefore questionable if this scale really measures what it is intended to measure.