What is Lean Thinking?

Origins

The ideas behind what is now termed lean thinking can be linked to several sources, including great industrialists like Henry Ford and management thinkers such as W. Edwards Deming.  Of particular note are the ideas originally developed in Toyota’s post Second World War manufacturing operations - known as the Toyota Production System – under the guidance of its chief engineer, Taiichi Ohno. These spread through its supply base in the 1970’s, and its distribution and sales operations in the 1980’s.

The term ‘lean’ was popularised in the seminal book ‘The Machine that Changed the World’ (Womack, Jones and Roos, 1990), which clearly illustrated - for the first time - the significant performance gap between the Japanese and western automotive industries.  It described the key elements accounting for this superior performance as lean production - ‘lean’ because Japanese business methods used less of everything - human effort, capital investment, facilities, inventories and time - in manufacturing, product development, parts supply and customer relations.