What is Lean?
Lean Enterprise - A business system for
organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers,
and customer relations. Business and other organizations use lean
principles, practices, and tools to create precise customer
value—goods and services with higher quality and fewer defects—with
less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time than the
traditional system of mass production.
Many of the key principles were pioneered by Henry Ford, who was
the first person to integrate an entire production system, under
what he termed “flow production." Following World War II, the
Toyota Motor Company adapted Ford’s principles as a means of
compensating for its challenge of limited human, financial, and
material resources. The Toyota Production System (or TPS), which
evolved from this need, was one of the first managerial systems
using lean principles throughout the enterprise to produce a wide
variety of products at lower volumes and many fewer defects than
competitors.
Leaders today in a wide range of industries, nonprofit
organizations, government agencies, healthcare, and other areas are
finding ways to apply the principles of lean as a means of
producing goods and delivering services that creates value for the
customer with the minimum amount of waste and the maximum degree of
quality.
Looking for further explanation of what is Lean?
Here are a few more detailed resources:
The
Beginner’s Guide to Lean - an article by Dan Jones provides a
clear explanation of lean for someone who is just getting
started.
Lean
Thinking - The first chapter of this key book by Jim
Womack and Dan Jones provides the best 20-page summary of lean
thinking available.
Toyota
Production System - This article on the Toyota website provides
a clear and comprehensive overview of the key principles of lean as
defined by the company itself. Note that Toyota chooses to focus on
what it defines as the two key pillars of TPS: jidoka, or the
highlighting and visualization of problems as a method of building
in quality during the manufacturing process; and just-in-time,
defined as “making only what is needed, when it is needed, and in
the amount needed.
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