Discussion on the Shortcomings and Countermeasures of Lean Management in Manufacturing Industry in the Industry 4.0 Era

Industry 4.0 and economic globalization have transformed the vast Earth into a "global village." At the same time, the world is experiencing major changes unseen in a century, presenting both risks and opportunities for China's manufacturing industry. The coexistence of lean, digital, interconnected, and intelligent practices is a necessary means to propel the upgrading and transformation of the manufacturing industry, reducing costs, and enhancing efficiency. Currently, most of China's manufacturing enterprises are at the Industrial 1.0, 2.0, or 3.0 stages, exhibiting a high degree of technological prowess but light management thinking, with inadequate crisis awareness. How can we utilize the tide of the "Made in China 2025" strategy and the 14th Five-Year Plan for intelligent manufacturing to navigate China's economy towards a high-quality development trajectory? Only by developing and nurturing the "lean" soft power of enterprises, establishing lean management with Chinese characteristics tailored to their needs, eliminating all waste, continuously improving, and achieving everyone's lean. Simultaneously, we must enhance the hard power, adhering to "internal and external refinement", in order to achieve a strategic leapfrogging in the global manufacturing game. This paper starts with an analysis of the crucial significance of lean management in Chinese manufacturing enterprises, introduces the history of lean management's development, deeply analyzes the current state and shortcomings of lean management in Chinese manufacturing enterprises, the difficulties and challenges faced by enterprises, and proposes targeted countermeasures and methods to address the problems of enterprise management, aiming to provide relevant references for the takeoff of Chinese manufacturing enterprises.