6.1 Introduction

Lean Techniques are applied in several contexts. There are books and papers published about Lean Manufacture, Lean Thinking, Lean Construction, Lean Marketing, Lean StartUp and Lean Software Development. However, the basic concepts are the same, i.e. the core ideas of Lean are to

  • maximize value
  • minimize waste

Based on this definition we could consider Lean as an optimization framework. In this lecture the generic Lean concepts and techniques will be introduced.