Understanding Lean Manufacturing: A Toyota Case Study

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1.1.3 Lean Manufacturing The term "lean manufacturing" or "lean production" was first used by Womack et al. (1990) in their book The Machine that Changed the World. Intense global competition, rapid technological changes, advances in manufacturing and information technology and discerning customers are forcing manufacturers to optimize manufacturing process, operations, and all the possible nodes of supply chains that enable them to deliver high-quality products in a short period of time (Karim et al. 2013). The origins of lean thinking can be found on the shop-floors of Japanese manufacturers and, in particular, innovations at Toyota Motor Corporation (Shingo, 1981, 1989; Monden, 1994; Ohno, 1988). These innovations, resulting from a scarcity of resources and intense domestic competition in the Japanese market for automobiles, included the just-in-time (JIT) production system, the Kanban method of pull production, respect for employees and high levels of employee problem-solving/automated mistake proofing. This lean operations management design approach focused on the elimination of waste and excess from the tactical product flows at Toyota (the Toyota "seven wastes") and represented an alternative model to that of capital-intense mass production with its large batch …show more content…

In other words lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. An organization which implements lean understands customer value and gives attention to its key processes to continuously increase it. The goal of lean organization is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste. Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to

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