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Lately, lean has been receiving a lot of attention from quality professionals, management and the media. After getting its start in manufacturing, it has now migrated to nonshop floor activities in sales, customer service, accounting, HR, engineering and purchasing, and to service organizations, such as financial institutions, government and hospitals.
Based on all this attention and input from readers, Quality Progress asked me to work with ASQ's Lean Enterprise Forum and create a bimonthly column. This is the first installment.
Lean is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS), which uses tried and true, mostly common-sense tools. In developing its successful system, Toyota looked at Ford Motor Co.'s approaches, U.S. military practices, industrial engineering and operations research techniques, American supermarket delivery and inventory control systems and German aircraft manufacturing methods-refining them and even making a few improvements.
As quality professionals, we likely have become familiar with lean in different ways. I started implementing kaizen in the late 1980s after being introduced to it in Masaaki Imai's book Kaizen: The Key to Japan's Competitive Success.' Though continuous improvement was as important then as it is now, the term "lean" didn't come into vogue until a little later, first as lean manufacturing and then as lean enterprise.
Core Concepts
Some of lean's core concepts are:
* Creativity before capital, which taps into the experience, innovation and knowledge of the people working in the process.
* An improvement not perfectly done today is better than the perfect solution done late. There is always a need for further continuous improvement.
* Inventory is not an asset but a cost or waste.
* There is power in teamwork and consensus through brainstorming.
Before You Embark
Different aspects of lean are...