Lean thinking, banish waste and create wealth in your corporation

Lean thinking by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones is the undisputed Number 1 book worldwide about lean management. It is written for those who are interested in redesigning their business processes and/or are open to a change of the company culture. The authors aspire to make the theory accessible and to provide explicit examples. The combination of examples and theory makes this book a good tool for action learning. The American authors Womack and Jones were one of the first to study and analyse the philosophy and methods behind the success of the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota. By the early 1980s, the Americans found out that Toyota was not an average company. Although many Americans believed that the Japanese cars were inferior to the vehicles made by their Ford or General Motors, the truth appeared to be slightly different. Directly after the SecondWorldWar, Toyota changed its core business from building textile machineries to car manufacturing. It was in this period that Toyota laid the foundations of lean management, by organizing its production process in a flexible way, completely opposite to the widely used system of mass production. Toyota’s production process is based on a system that always starts with determining the value for a customer, which will ultimately determine the production process used. By way of example, Toyota only produces cars ‘on demand’ rather than by mass advance production. This way you only produce to the needs and timing of a customer. To be able to do this, you need a flexible production system with short lead times. Instead of pushing the products through the system, you create ‘pull’. A pull system has less waste, such as stocks, defects and transport. All the processes have to be in line, in order to let the product flow through the system as fast as possible. This flexibility has been the reason for the Americans to label the Toyota production system ‘lean’. Over the past 60 years lean became Toyota’s philosophy on which the company culture is based. All the work methods used today by the Toyota employees are derived from lean. For a Toyota employee it is equally important to learn how to manufacture or sell a car, as it is to know how to work according to the lean system. I am a lean consultant and as a part of my lean implementation program, I always advise my clients to read Lean thinking so as to get a better understanding of the lean Action Learning: Research and Practice Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2007, pp. 105–114