Varia Ranah - Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam

453 Varia Ranah: Sorotan Ilmiah Perkhidmatan Awam INTRODUCTION The demands on efficiency and quality in the public sector have never been so great over the past few years, which have raised the need for strategies on how public sector can be improved (Denhardt and Denhardt, 2000). Today, public sector is expected to be flexible and agile in every aspect. Painful as it may, public sectors are required to do more with less - especially less in resources and budget. (Ramli, et al., 2016). They are also constantly under heavy pressure to resolve countless domestic and international challenges, including maximising societal welfare and security, ensuring political, economic and environment sustainability, as well as ensuring on improving the rakyat’s quality of life (Hughes, et al., 2011; Ramli, et al., 2016). To address the problem, public-sector leaders are looking with growing interest at "lean" techniques long used in private industry. BACKGROUND The discussion on lean will first bring us to the definition of the lean itself. Many academicians and practitioners have debated over the term of lean. Schonberger (1986) firmly believed that lean focused on eliminating seven types of cardinal wastes which are (i) defects, (ii) waiting, (iii) motion, (iv) overproduction, (v) transport, (vi) over-processing, and (vii) inventory; as well as respecting suppliers, customers and employees. Dahlgaard and Dahlgaard ‐ Park, (2006) and Barraza et al. (2009) on the other hand, consider lean thinking as one of the methodologies that support reduction of waste and targeting on low cost improvements. Similarly, Comm and Mathaisel (2005) see this as methodology of ‘lean’ to help an organisation to “do more with less”. Abdi et al. (2006) view it as an act of maximising the utilisation of organisation’s resources. Modig and Ahlstrom (2012) describe it as an operational strategy that emphasises on resolving the efficiency paradox - flow efficiency over resource efficiency. For Burgess and Radnor (2013), lean is about eliminating the non-value-added activities to improve the products or services’ quality.