Lean thinking
Lean thinking is a business methodology focused on enhancing value and productivity by minimizing waste in processes. The core principle is to eliminate unnecessary efforts, time, and resources, enabling organizations to accomplish more with fewer resources while maintaining or improving the quality of their output. Originating from concepts first popularized in the early 20th century, lean thinking gained significant traction in the 1990s and has since found applications across various sectors, including manufacturing, retail, and even personal productivity.
The approach emphasizes streamlined operations, where every step of a process is assessed for its necessity, thereby promoting efficiency. Notably, the Toyota Production System (TPS) exemplifies lean thinking through methods that manage production flow and inventory effectively. Key to lean thinking is understanding customer needs and producing goods or services in response to actual demand, minimizing overproduction and excess stock.
Through continual assessment and refinement of processes, lean thinking seeks to enhance the speed and quality of service delivery. Its principles can also manifest in everyday activities, illustrating its broad relevance beyond traditional manufacturing environments.
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Lean thinking
Lean thinking is a business system that strives for increased value and productivity by cutting waste of all sorts. By eliminating wasted effort, time, and resources, companies that use lean thinking are able to get more work done faster and with fewer workers while still maintaining or improving quality. Although lean thinking concepts have been used for decades, they gained in popularity during the 1990s. In the twenty-first century, several methods for implementing lean thinking have been developed and applied to everything from the manufacturing process and retail sales to personal and household productivity.
Background
Lean thinking is based on the idea of leanness, or having a minimal structure with nothing extraneous or unnecessary. For example, a piece of meat, an animal, or a person who is lean has very little or no fat. Similarly, an organization that uses lean thinking principles strives to "trim the fat" by eliminating wasteful practices so that every part of its operation is of greater value and usefulness.
Lean thinking attempts to make a project, a company, an industry, or another enterprise work better and more efficiently by streamlining processes. Implementing lean thinking in a given enterprise requires increased focus on identifying areas in need of improvement and noticing areas where wasteful processes can be eliminated. Lean thinking aims specifically to improve the velocity of service, or the speed and flexibility of the work flow. Finally, it emphasizes value through the creation of higher-quality products or services using the fewest resources possible.
Examples of using principles associated with lean thinking can be found throughout history. One of the best-known instances was when Henry Ford established the first moving assembly lines for the mass production of automobiles in the early 1900s. Ford employed the principles of lean thinking in several ways. He limited his production of automobiles to one standard chassis, which made it easy to standardize the assembly. He standardized parts, which reduced excess inventory and made assembly processes more uniform. In addition, he designed the factory so that each person on the assembly line was responsible for a specialized task, which he or she performed repeatedly. This reduced the amount of training employees required. It also reduced the amount of wasted time that resulted from simple actions, such as switching tools.
While Ford's ideas were good, they did not work as well in factories that produced multiple products or various models of the same product. Beginning in the 1930s, Japanese automakers began looking for ways to improve the process to take these variables in account. Employees at Toyota, including Taiichi Ohno, devised a method that became known as the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS emphasized how cars in production moved through the process. Assembly machinery was placed in the order in which it was used. Machinery was designed so that it could be modified quickly and efficiently to change what it made. TPS also involved the implementation of the Kanban system. The Kanban system required each team or person to notify the appropriate personnel when inventory was getting low and needed to be reordered. Through the Kanban system, Toyota was able to eliminate excess stock. TPS became a model for how to increase productivity and quality while reducing waste.
In 1990, three American experts on engineering and the automobile industry—James P. Womack, Daniel Roos, and Daniel T. Jones—cowrote The Machine that Changed the World. The authors explained the principles of lean thinking and how to apply them to manufacturing and corporate enterprises. They also established the Lean Enterprise Institute to share information and help companies implement their system. In 1996, Womack and Jones wrote a follow-up book titled Lean Thinking, which elaborated on the main principles of lean thinking.
Overview
The lean thinking process promoted by Womack, Jones, and Roos emphasizes identifying what customers want from a particular product or service and then determining how to produce the desired product or service using the fewest steps and the least amount of effort. Their method also involves eliminating excess of any type. Using the lean thinking process, business or company leaders identify the process used to produce the item or service. Next, they examine each step in the process to determine whether it is necessary to achieve the desired result. Once the minimum number of necessary steps has been identified, the steps are organized in the most efficient way. This includes implementing the concept of pull, which is when each team or person in the process gathers, or "pulls," only what is necessary to complete the assigned task and notifies the appropriate people when more inventory is needed. When lean thinking is employed, a product or item is produced only when a customer demand for it exists. This helps businesses or companies avoid wasted time, effort, and inventory on unwanted items. The process is continually monitored for more ways to further reduce time, effort, and inventory.
While the process may seem most relevant to manufacturing, lean thinking—and the systems derived from it—can be applied to other areas. For instance, a store clerk who bags items as he or she scans them is implementing lean thinking principles. Instead of handling the item to scan it, setting it down, and then picking it up again to bag it, the clerk handles the item once. This accomplishes what the customer wants—to pay for purchases—using the fewest steps possible. It allows the clerk to wait on more people and reduces the wait for people in line. Buses and amusement park rides that load passengers in one door and discharge them from another also use lean thinking. Another example of lean thinking in everyday life is a cafeteria-style restaurant at which people move down a line to choose only the foods they want, pay for them, and then seat themselves.
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