6.2 History

Lean was established during the 1940s at Toyota. However, it was not a completely new thing that time as it has its roots in flow production, standardization and continuous improvement.

Flow production

• Standard war galleys produced in high volume in very short period of time (hours) during 1500’s in Venice (after 400 years of learning and optimization)

Standardization, process improvement

• Objective: process improvement
• Frederick Taylor, Gilberth, Henry Ford
• Standardized manufacturing methods for achieving efficiency and productivity
• Simplify work (e.g. layering a brick reduced from 18 steps to 4.5, 300% improvement)
• Workers are considered as property/resources and not as thinking people

Lean Manufacturing

• Objective: deliver value to the customer, empower the workers and teams
• Toyota Production System: the basis of Lean methodologies are established (1948)
• “The Machine that Changed the World” book introduced the term Lean (MIT, 1990)
• “Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation” (MIT, 1996)
• Competing continuous improvement methodologies:
• Total Quality Management: holistic quality management in daily work (U.S. Navy, 1984)
• Six Sigma: rigorous improvement process measured in dollar savings (Motorola, 1986)
• Became famous with General Electric, 1995
• Theory of Constraints: discover and eliminate bottlenecks (1992)
• Reengineering the Corporation: business process reengineering (1993)
• All of the methodologies have Japanese roots and some relations to the Toyota Production System
• Boeing Production System

Lean Adoption

• Applying continuous improvement not just in the factory but in the office, accounting, software development, etc.
• New application areas: health care, banking, insurance, etc.

Figure 6.1: Lean History