OVERVIEW

U.S. companies have always been enamored with strategies to reduce waste, create competitive advantage, increase throughput, and gain market share. Mass production manufacturing methods have been replaced by results-oriented lean production systems that focus on waste elimination throughout the enterprise. The concepts, definitions, and methodologies of lean have been present in American industry for decades. Probably the most well-known example of lean is Toyota, when it developed its Toyota Production System (TPS) after World War II; it finally caught the Western world's attention after the 1973 oil crisis. For over 20 years before anyone knew it, Toyota pursued the TPS primarily to eliminate waste and reduce costs in its production system it was the obvious solution to manage the constraints of space, people, and limited resources. But the reality is that many of the basic concepts of lean have been applied in business for the past 100 years. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, the book Lean Thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones brought a more focused and disciplined approach to lean with the five key lean principles: (1) specify value, (2) create the value stream, (3) flow, (4) pull, and (5) perfection. However, it has been our experience that 80% of organizations have, for the most part, "dabbled" in lean, and the remaining 20% have adopted lean as a business philosophy and have real substance to show for their efforts.

Lean deals with the elimination and reduction of many types of non-value-added...