What is Lean?

Lean Basics and Lean Classics
Lean is a business strategy of seeking to provide exactly what your customers want when they want it with as little waste as possible. Based on the Toyota Production System, it is a strategy of continuous improvement, in which you never stop trying to improve your processes by eliminating waste.
Lean is often known as lean manufacturing because it has been widely applied to manufacturing production. However, lean principles can and are also being applied to a wide range of non-manufacturing situations.
These books include several seminal lean texts and cover fundamental principles.

Leadership and Strategy
As these books explain, a lean approach involves transforming the culture of your company, which places new demands on managers and executives. They must be less autocratic and must foster a new culture of teamwork, empowerment and constant improvement.

Office and Administrative Processes
Lean principles are being applied to a wide variety of non-manufacturing operations, resulting in waste reduction, cost savings, greater capacity and speedier operations.

Product Development
Lean principles are also being used to help streamline product development processes, shortening time to market.

Teams and Employee Involvement
Employees of a lean company are organized in teams, each of which is a group of people who rely on cooperation, trust and communication to accomplish objectives, and who are empowered to implement improvements.

Lean is a systemic approach, requiring commitment and involvement from all levels of an organization. However, lean methodologies include a variety of tools, each of which is designed to achieve a specific type of improvement.

• 5S
  5S, often a starting point for a lean transformation, is used to organize a work area, making it easier for the worker to do his or her job. 5S is the foundation for a visual workplace.
• Mistake-Proofing
  Mistake-proofing, also known as poka-yoke, is used to prevent defects or equipment malfunctions. This is achieved through methods or devices that eliminate choices leading to incorrect actions, and by creating signals or automatic shutdowns when errors occur.
• Cellular Manufacturing
  Becoming lean often involves the creation of work cells, each of which is a logical, efficient and usually self-contained arrangement of equipment, machinery, tooling and/or personnel to complete a production sequence. The cell enables one-piece flow and just-in-time manufacturing.
• Total Productive Maintenance
  Often referred to by its acronym TPM, this tool enlists operators in the design, selection, correction and maintenance of equipment to ensure that every machine or process is always able to correctly perform its required tasks without interruption or slowing down. TPM includes the strategy of autonomous maintenance.
• Value Stream Management
  (VSM) links lean initiatives throughout the value stream by systematic data analysis. (A value stream is all the activities required to design and produce a specific product.) VSM includes value stream mapping, which is the identification of all the specific activities (material and information flow) occurring along the value stream for a particular product or product family, usually represented by a value stream map.
• Quick changeover
  Also known as SMED (single minute exchange of die), this is a series of operator techniques that result in changeovers of production machinery in fewer than 10 minutes. The long-term objective is always zero setup, in which changeovers are instantaneous and do not interfere in any way with one-piece flow.

Kanban and Supply Chain
A kanban is a type of visual control - such as a card, or even an electronic signal - representing a certain quantity of material or parts. It is an essential part of pull production, in which a kanban signals an upstream operation to supply what is needed by a downstream operation. These principles are applied not only within an organization, but in the extended supply chain involving suppliers and customers.

Metrics and Finance
Metrics that measure production performance and gains achieved through improvement activities are an essential part of a lean strategy. One aspect of this is establishment of financial metrics and accounting approaches that provide the best information and drive the right behavior.

Shopfloor Series
The Productivity Press Shopfloor Series is a collection of books providing simple, clear, illustrated instructions for operators and managers, each book covering a particular lean principle.

Case Studies
The books in the Productivity Press Insights on Implementation series consist of articles, most of them case studies, previously published in the Lean Manufacturing Advisor newsletter. These case studies can provide valuable information about the real-world issues involved in lean implementations

Six Sigma and Quality Management
Lean is not the only approach to process improvement. Another is six sigma, which seeks to reduce defects by reducing process variation. Quality management techniques are also well-established strategies for achieving improvement.