Lean

The secret weapon of the world’s leader in automotive production: Toyota

What is Lean? 

• Lean literally means: ‘slim’. 
• The Lean philosophy is developed by Toyota. It aims at eliminating waste in (production) processes, in order to create slim processes. 
• Waste costs money and adds no value for the end customer. 
• So, waste should be eliminated as much as possible. 
• The Lean philosophy focusses on the entire company, from workplace till boardroom. Within this philosophy, several tools have been developed for all levels in the organization.

Lean tools

• 5S workplace organization for production departments.
• Strategy Deployment for the companies’ management, in order to involve the organization in executing the business strategy.
• Visual management to reveal problems and deviations 
• Job instructions to secure the proper practices in the workplace, etc.

Lean management philosophy looks like a house.

wastes: the essence of Lean

Companies that are set  to lean, focus entirely on those activities the customer wishes to pay for. That’s what we call ‘Adding value’. All other activities can be considered as waste: the customer will not pay for them. In business processes we distinguish seven types of waste:

1. Transport
2. Inventory
3. Motion
4. Waiting
5. Overproduction
6. Overprocessing
7. Defects

No waste means: excellent results.

For more information, please contact:  Freerk Kingma

The history of lean

1574: The Arsenal in Venice becomes the first example in history of FLOW:  ships were built along a production line.

1760: The French General Jean-Baptiste de Gribeauvalunderstands the importance of standardized parts in repairing damage to military equipment during the war.

1822: Thomas Blanchard sets up a production line of 14 machines in a cell layout in the Springfield Armory (US) for manufacturing parts of guns.

1914: Henry Ford builds the first driven assembly line for assembling the T ford, reducing the assembly time from 12 hours to 3 hours.

1924: Sakichi Toyoda (Toyota) designs an automatic loom which stops when an error occurs (broken wire). This is the first example in history of built-in quality.

1947 - 1949: Taiichi Ohno (founder of Toyota Production System) introduces multi-machine handling, time studies, the concept of 7 wastes and the ‘line stop authority’ to the production employees.

1950: Deming introduces management concepts in Japan, such as Plan Do Check Act or statistical process control. He amongst others convinces Toyota that quality improvements can drastically reduce costs.

1984 Toyota, very successful in the US, starts the joint venture NUMMI with GM. By using Lean principles, Nummi becomes the best performing plant of GM in the US, while before it was the worst.