Hindawi Publishing Corporation ISRN Industrial Engineering Volume 2013, Article ID 237402, 10 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/237402 Research Article Analysis of Technology Effectiveness of Lean Manufacturing Using System Dynamics Hasan Hosseini-Nasab, Mohammad Dehghani, and Amin Hosseini-Nasab School of Engineering, Yazd University, P.O. Box 89195-741, Yazd, Iran Correspondence should be addressed to Hasan Hosseini-Nasab; hhn@yazd.ac.ir Received 30 June 2013; Accepted 29 August 2013 Academic Editors: C. A. Bulucea and T. F. Espino-Rodriguez Copyright © 2013 Hasan Hosseini-Nasab et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In today’s competitive environment, organizations are seeking to improve their position in the market. Lean manufacturing is an efective tool for elevating the competitiveness of organizations based on the fact that each can ind its own way of improvement. Technology improvement is considered to be one of lean manufacturing’s dimensions. Technology is deined as the usage and knowledge of tools, techniques, crats, systems, or methods of organization, with the aim of solving a problem or creating an artistic perspective. A dynamic model could be appropriate for analyzing the interrelated behavior of technology and lean manufacturing. Despite the fact that there are plenty of papers and case studies on the applications of Lean manufacturing in organizations, only a few are focused on the dynamic aspects of the system. In this paper, a dynamic model is presented in which Lean manufacturing is linked with technology by causal relationships. he notable advantage of the presented model is the ability to alter a parameter to ind how it afects others parameters by considering key results. hus, it is reasonable to expect that the results of such analysis could somewhat improve the eiciency of technology improvement on Lean manufacturing. 1. Introduction Lean philosophy has been prevalent in the manufacturing industry during recent decades. However, even today, a large number of manufacturers are struggling to successfully embrace Lean principles. Results of the Aberdeen Group’s report on lean scheduling indicate that, among manufac- turers, those who adopted Lean sotware applications have exceeded many of their competitors, thus making Lean sot- ware adoption vital for manufacturers. What manufacturers require is to standardize Lean processes across their enter- prise by establishing a Lean center and providing factory loor data as actionable intelligence, in order to successfully lever- age their investments in technology [1]. In today’s competitive world with its vast and rapid chan- ges in scientiic-technical areas and continuous challenges in economical-social systems, there are still many irms with a suitable position. hese irms are lexible, pure, and customer oriented due to proper use of available facilities, suitable utilization of new sources for producing goods, and introduc- tion of desirable services with suitable quality. Using philoso- phies like Lean manufacturing and employing tools such as technology, irms can establish an eicient and stable system to improve their weak points and protect their strong points (recoverable areas), enabling them to continuously identify their planning priorities and recover their recoverable areas by using corrective actions, resulting in gradually passing organizational transcendence levels and improving their eiciency. Among various tools for performing Lean manufacturing assessments, technology has remarkably allowed the obtain- ing of world class function as well as recovering job function. In addition, technologies have stimulated immense attention as they provide a powerful tool for continuous recovering which is the focus of many organizations and irms. he general aim of technology is the reorganization of tools, tech- niques, crats, systems, and methods of organization together with the method of applying them to solve a problem or create an artistic perspective. In order to reach this goal, interactions should be used to identify the cause and efect of relationships between technology and Lean manufacturing. In this way, the main problem of an organization originates from little or weak identiication of the cause and efect structure between