TABLE OF CONTENTS Lean manufacturing is a very effective manufacturing strategy first developed by Toyota. During a benchmarking study for the automobile industry in the late 1990s (Womack, Jones, and Roos 1990), it was found that Toyota clearly stood above its competitors around the world with the ability it developed to efficiently design, manufacture, market, and service the automobiles it produced. This ability made a significant contribution to both the company's profitability and growth as consumers found the products to simultaneously exhibit both quality and value. The researchers found that the focus on recognizing and eliminating wasteful actions and utilizing a greater proportion of the company's resources to add value for the ultimate customer was the key to the operating philosophy. "Lean production" is first mentioned in this study and is used to describe the efficient, less wasteful production system developed by Toyota, called the Toyota production system. Lean production in comparison to mass production was shown to require one-half the time to develop new products, one-half the engineering hours to design, one-half the factory hours to produce, and one-half the investment in tools, facilities, and factory space (Monden 1993, Ohno 1990, Shingo 1989).
Although the lean manufacturing approach was originally developed in the traditional manufacturing industry, lean manufacturing mostly deals with production systems from a process viewpoint, not a hardware viewpoint. It has been found that most lean manufacturing principles can be readily adopted in other types of processes, such as product development, office, and service factory processes.
