Synergizing Lean Management and Digital Transformation to Drive Organizational Agility in SME Manufacturing

• Abbas Ahsun

  Texas University

  Author

Small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) face mounting pressure to respond rapidly to volatile market conditions, yet the integration of lean management principles with digital transformation initiatives to achieve organizational agility remains undertheorized and empirically underexplored. This study addresses the gap by investigating how lean management and digital transformation jointly influence organizational agility in SME manufacturing contexts. Drawing on dynamic capabilities theory and socio-technical systems theory, a mixed-methods design was employed, combining survey data from 312 manufacturing SMEs with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) analysis and multiple case evidence. The findings reveal that lean management practices and digital transformation capabilities exhibit a significant synergistic effect on organizational agility, with the integrated model achieving 89.4% explanatory accuracy (R² = 0.894) for agility outcomes. Production-oriented digital technologies emerged as stronger predictors of agility than customer-facing tools, while lean-driven waste elimination and continuous improvement amplified digital transformation effectiveness. The study concludes that neither lean nor digital transformation alone sufficiently drives agility; rather, their deliberate orchestration through socio-technical alignment produces superior outcomes. The proposed framework offers practitioners a validated roadmap and provides academics with a replicable model for examining lean-digital synergy in resource-constrained manufacturing settings.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abbas Ahsun (Author)

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