LEAN MANUFACTURING: THEORY AND PRACTICE

Abstract

Lean manufacturing began as the Toyota Production System in the Japanese auto industry of the 1970s and 1980s. Its main goals were to eliminate waste, reduce the need for managing large inventories, and provide optimum quality at the least cost by making quality control decisions an immediate part of the manufacturing process. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) to address their specific needs in a restricted market in times of economic trouble. Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, lean production, or often simply, "Lean," is a practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Lean can be described at different levels of abstraction: it can be defined as a philosophy, as a set of principles and as bundles of practices. Lean as one of the popular concepts has been studied and practiced in many companies. It has been proven to be transferrable and applicable to a wide variety of industries and services.
The paper aims to identify the main principles of Lean and disclose success factors in Lean implementation. Authors of this paper present the model of Lean implementation process.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.em.17.2.2205