Brief history of lean management & Toyota production System

By Falaye Leke Jonathan; 24 Feb 2014
   

According to Young (2010, p.30), the term lean management was first used by the authors James Womack and Daniel Jones in their books “the machine that changed the world (1991)” and further defined in their book “lean thinking (2003)”. This concept is essentially nothing more than a renaming of the Japanese production system just-in-time (JIT).

Lean management is a means of waste identification (for example, wasted labour, materials of some resources) or in operations (for instance manufacturing, services and administration) so that it can be removed (that is made lean) for greater efficiency, this is a dynamic process of continual change and is not a standardized one-size-fit-all approach but an adaptive means of efficiency improvement (Schniederjans, Schniederjans and Schniederjans, 2010, p.3).

This is an interesting video that explain lean management in connecting with how it can help organisation to achieve competitive advantage   

Lean manufacturing is concern about the speed of the product; it focuses on improving the quality of the product and the stability of all the processes. Equally, lean concept employs the use of some tools which includes, value stream mapping, cellular manufacturing, total productive maintenance, error proofing, visual control and practical problem solving (Gemba academy, 2011).

A typical example of company known for practising lean management is Toyota. Toyota lean management philosophies includes,

Ø  Just-in-time: system of delivering parts to the assembly line in a continuous flow rather than stockpiling large volumes in the plant.

Ø  Continuous improvement: process of analysis and solving problems on a daily basis.

Ø  Personal responsibility: Each worker on production line is given responsibility for each process he carries out.

Ø  Flexible production: several different models can be produced on the same assembly line.

Ø  Design for manufacture: Making the component a car easy to fit together on assembly.

                                                                                                                      (BBC, 2007)

The major advantage of this process in Toyota is that it allows the organisation to get closer to consumers need. It equally aids faster development of new model because Toyota now develops new model in 18month, compared to the traditional three years (BBC, 2007).

This video explains more about Toyota lean production 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KJaEOiHxNw

According to Turkyilmaz, et.al (2013), value steaming mapping is a collection of all the procedures that are required to bring products through the main flow starting with raw materials and ending with customers. The main purpose of value stream mapping is to pinpoint the various categories of waste in the value stream and take steps to try to eliminate them.

Visual management or control as a tool of lean manufacturing is simply a visible pattern of control which employs the use of visual perception and suitable colours to guide standardize and organise the production, aiming to ensure safety of production and improve labour productivity (Hao, Wei and Tian, 2014).

In addition, cellular manufacturing is another tool of lean management. This is an innovative manufacturing strategy derived from a group technology concept. It is an approach that can be used to improve both flexibility and efficiency in contemporary competitive manufacturing environment. Cellular manufacturing involves, cell formation, group layout, group scheduling and resource allocation (Kai, et.al, 2012).