Methods
Lean Manufacturing
Also Known As Lean Production
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Lean manufacturing is a production approach organized around eliminating waste in every form, any activity that consumes time, material or capacity without adding value the customer will pay for, while continuously improving the process. It generalizes the Toyota Production System that Taiichi Ohno and Kiichiro Toyoda built at Toyota from the late 1940s onward, informed by Ohno's study of Henry Ford's moving assembly line and of how American supermarkets restocked shelves only as goods actually sold. Toyota adopted the system company wide in 1962. The English term lean production was coined by engineer John Krafcik in his 1988 MIT Sloan Management Review article Triumph of the Lean Production System, drawn from his research at NUMMI, the Toyota-General Motors joint venture, and at MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program; Krafcik and his MIT colleagues James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos popularized the term worldwide in their 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World.
Facts
Core PrincipleIdentify what the customer actually values, map the steps that create it, remove every step that does not add that value, and let real demand pull production rather than pushing to a forecast. 1 Origin Year1988 is when John Krafcik coined the term lean production in print; the Toyota Production System it generalizes had already run company wide since 1962, with roots reaching to Kiichiro Toyoda's just-in-time thinking in the 1930s. Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Invented By
Krafcik coined the term lean production in his 1988 Sloan Management Review paper, generalizing the Toyota Production System he studied at NUMMI.
In the Other Atlases
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.