Lean production has been a popular practice in production based organizations for decades.Although new alternative ideas are conceived, lean never seem to lose its foothold as one ofthe major paradigms of production. The purpose of this study is to research how methods influenced by lean production can grow organically within organizations, which benefits it brings for this type of bottom-up approach, and the areas that are hard to implement by doing it this way. The study explores the problems through a case study of a single organizational source. Data collection was gathered at Holtab AB in Tingsryd, Sweden through qualitative semi-structured interviews and empirical observations of the plant. Data was collected this way to get a nuanced view of the production process and the people within it. The empirical data covers how lean can grow organically in an organization without any initiation from top management. The key findings show that this bottom-up approach to lean is effective for the interpersonal aspects of lean, including the ease of organizational change, the benefits of a multifunctional workforce and creative ways of stabilizing external demand in the studied organization. Concepts that require collaboration between departments seem to be the major drawback of this approach, which clearly shows in the lack of, and failure of implementation of just-in-time methods.
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