Lean Manufacturing

The history of Lean Manufacturing goes back many centuries, well before Fords famous production lines for the model T ford, however it really starts to begin to be the philosophy that we know today with Toyota and the development of the Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota set out to be far better than Ford and the rest of the US Automobile Industry, an ambition that they quickly achieved despite a lack of resources and infrastructure. They achieved this through the application of Lean Principles and the many Lean Manufacturing Tools. Toyota are far from perfect by their own admission, they are only part way on their never ending journey of Lean Manufacturing. To understand what lean is it is helpful to understand why it developed, if you can understand the purpose of lean then you can better grasp exactly what it is. Lean (and the Toyota Production System) have two main purposes, Provide Customer Satisfaction Do so Profitably Everything within Lean focuses on these two main points, with customer satisfaction taking the fore at all times. Everything that you do should provide value to the customer, anything else is waste. If the customer does not explicitly want it why are you doing it This is why when you look at any process your first question should always be WHY Too many practitioners of lean jump straight into applying principles to a process without even questioning why the process exists, often they make a wasteful process more efficient and you end up getting better at doing something the customer does not even want.