Items, notes, issues, ideas related to Lean Manufacturing principals.

What is Lean Manufacturing? It is a strategy of identifying and eliminating waste in the operations of an organization. It can be applied to most any organization that has defined and regular processes. For this discussion, we are focusing on manufacturing organizations.

Toyota is probably the largest manufacturing organization extensively employing Lean principles and techniques. TPS, the Toyota Production System is used as a model for many implementaions of Lean. Taiichi Ohno, an executive at Toyota is credited with developing tenets like '5s' and 'Seven Deadly wastes', or 'muda'. A lot of japanese terms like 'kaban' and 'kaizan' appear in Lean literature because of Toyota's pioneering efforts.

The Lean Enterprise Institute is a great reference site. Jim Womack a founder of the Lean Institute and Dan Roos coined the term 'Lean Production' in their book, The Machine that changed the World.