preview

Lean Manufacturing And The Production System

Decent Essays
Open Document      Try Paraphrasing toolOpen Document

Definition
Lean manufacturing is the process of eliminating waste in every area such as production, supply chain, maintenance, quality control and factory management.
The ultimate goal of lean manufacturing is to decrease the human effort, inventory and time to meet the customer demand in the most efficient and possible economical manner.
Lean manufacturing is referred to the methods of manufacturing that gives maximum value and minimum waste in the process that is followed. Lean manufacturing is also used to focus on the resources to maximize the value added features and eliminate the non-value added features.
There were different names for Lean over the years which was primarily developed from the Toyota Production System (TPS) it has …show more content…

In Ohno’s book ‘TPS – beyond large scale production’ Ohno described how TPS evolved out of need, as the market place in post war Japan required small quantities of cars to be produced in many varieties. This became very different ot the Ford principle of mass-production.
Although TPS began in 1950, Japanese firms noticed only in the 1973 where oil crisis took place. Since then the system has been studied, copied and implemented across many industries.
Womack, Jones and Roos (1990) coined the phrase “Lean Manufacturing” in the MIT five-year study into the automotive industry that led to the book “The Machine That Changed the World”. This gives a pretty good insight into The History of Lean Manufacturing
Even with the massive amount of research that has taken place into the Toyota Production System, fifty one years after it was born, Slack et al still refer to Lean Manufacturing as a ‘radical departure from traditional operations practice’.

The Timeline of Lean Manufacturing:
1926 - Sakichi Toyoda sells foreign rights to loom and Sakichi Toyoda patents Toyoda Automatic Loom with Non-Stop Shuttle-change motion
1936 - Kiichiro Toyoda (Sakichi’s son) starts Toyota (then called

Get Access