So what is lean manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing, also referred to as “lean thinking”, is a term coined sometime in the late 80’s/earlier 90’s. The term stems from a book entitled, The Machine That Changed the World. The books was written based on research done by MIT who were looking at the car manufacturer Toyota and what they were doing in the way they were building cars. The MIT researchers were looking at the production system within Toyota and how it differed from other car manufacturers and other traditional mass production processes.
Essentially, lean manufacturing is a business system that constitutes organizing and managing everything in the organization that results in creating a product or providing a service using less effort, less space, less invested capital, less materials, and less time. While working through the process, the company is still producing exactly what the customer wants and provides a product or service with fewer defects. While lean manufacturing was pioneered by Toyota, it has become a new paradigm for manufacturing and has grown in both breadth and size since that time.
In 1996, two men named Womack and Jones who were from England, wrote the book Lean Thinking. In 2007, they began to change the way lean manufacturing was described. They split up the concept into purpose, process, and people. It is about what the customer really wants and sees as valuable and then building on that through the development process, through the manufacturing process, and carries it through right until fulfillment, support, and essentially for the life of the product. The lean manufacturing process now encourages a culture where everyone is involved with product or service improvement on a continuous basis, based on the values that have been identified.
Customers are expecting a lot more than in years past as far as pricing and lead times. Lean manufacturing may have started out based on the car industry but has since grown into a concept used by most manufacturing companies in order to remain competitive. While the term lean is a bit misleading, it is all about making the manufacturing process more efficient and better for both the business and the customer. Businesses have more of a capacity to grow and the concept is not difficult for any type of manufacturing business to understand or incorporate into their current structure. It is simply about being more organized, more efficient in the workplace. Most importantly businesses need to keep in mind that they need to keep identifying the constraints in their business and use the lean manufacturing process to keep working to improve on those limitations.