Perspectives of pilot testing as a lean tool: to conduct a sustainable survey in Indian textile industry

Abstract

Lean manufacturing is a philosophy of eliminating waste through continuous improvement. This paper is an outcome of a survey study conducted in a textile industry in north India. Though the concept of lean has shown good results in manufacturing industry, it is still a challenge to implement traditional lean tools in complex survey-based studies, usually carried out in Indian textile sector. In the present study, a questionnaire is designed to capture the true voice of different stakeholders, without ignoring the critical constraints of the vast textile environment of the country. This has further caused confusion and makes this critical process of gathering feedback more complicated. Through this research paper, a unique effort is made to exploit lean philosophy and a slight freedom has been taken to select out-of-basket lean tools, to reduce the vague inflation in survey-based textile research. The 'pilot-testing' of questionnaire was taken as a 'lean-tool' to simplify and standardise the concerned questionnaire for carrying out the survey more logically. This lean tool will not only remove the unwanted questions or items from the concerned questionnaire, but also suggest combining similar questions without compromising the overall reliability. This will make the whole survey more relevant and with least inter-collinearity and repetition.