Lean Approach to the Management of Academic Libraries of Medical Sciences

Lean management through continuous improvement, elimination of waste and creation of value in an organization along with the participation of employees on the one hand and customers on the other leads to much benefit of the service and production systems in their cost control and quality improvement. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the amount of the application of the components of Lean management in medical school libraries in the northern Iran. The present study is a cross sectional in which the viewpoints of 105 managers and employees of different medical schools of the northern part of Iran including Babol, Mazandaran, Golestan, and Guilan about the application of the characteristics of Lean management were investigated. Due to the limited scope of the participants, they were all selected as the sample. The research instrument, a researcher-made questionnaire which consisted of eight sections and 64 Likert type questions was validated by the Delphi method. Using descriptive and inferential statistics, the data was analyzed by one-sample t-test, independent t-test, Freidman, Kruskal Wallis, and Mann Whitney by the SPSS 20 package. Findings showed Assuming three as the criterion number, the general average of the characteristics of the Lean management in the surveyed libraries was 3.69. The highest average belonged to the buying system management (3.88) and the lowest was for the human resource organization (3.54). There was no significant difference between the viewpoints of the managers and employees of the surveyed libraries regarding the characteristics of Lean management and also the state of Lean management in these four universities (p?0.05). And Finally, Data analysis indicates that the state of the application of the Lean management is at a desirable level.