Lean Production
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Lean Production Gunther Reinhart, Josef Greitemann and Michael Niehues Institute for Machine Tools and Industrial Management (iwb), Technical University of Munich (TUM), Garching, Germany
results in many fewer defects and produces a greater and ever growing variety of products” (Womack et al. 1990, p. 11). However, lean production is more than a production practice. It is a holistic mindset and management system, contrary to the traditional approach of mass production (Womack et al. 1990).
Synonyms
Theory and Application
Kaizen and continuous improvement; Lean management; Lean manufacturing; Lean production; Toyota Production System; World class manufacturing
The Toyota Production System
Definition The term “lean production” was first introduced in “The machine that changed the world,” published in 1990 (Holweg 2007), to differentiate Toyota’s production practices from mass production in the automotive industry. Thus, lean production can be seen as a synonym to the Toyota Production System (TPS), which is elaborated in this entry. John Krafcik described TPS as a production which “uses less of everything compared with mass production – half the human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, half the engineering hours to develop a product in half the time. Also, it requires keeping far less than half the needed inventory on site,
Origins
Toyota developed its TPS after World War II to cope with capital constraints and low production volumes. TPS was implemented by adapting mass production strategies of American car manufactures to Toyota’s situation (Ōno 1988; Holweg 2007). Developed between the late 1940s and 1960s (Ōno 1988), the concept of TPS was first published in English in 1977 (Holweg 2007). Although some TPS-specific tools like Just-inTime or Kanban had been implemented in western companies in the 1980s, it took more than a decade until TPS became popular in the automotive industry. Published in 1990, “The machine that changed the world” was not only a mere description of Toyota’s manufacturing in comparison to European and American car manufactures but a wakeup call for the western industry (Holweg 2007). In the subsequent years, many companies were implementing TPS more or less successful. These
# CIRP 2016 The International Academy for Production Engineering et al. (eds.), CIRP Encyclopedia of Production Engineering, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-35950-7_16831-1
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Lean Production
companies only applied single methods and without regarding the basic principles. Principle
The overall objective of the TPS, depicted in Fig. 1, is to only provide products that fulfill the customer’s needs. According to Ōno (1988, p. ix), founder of TPS, the underlying principle of the TPS can be summarized as follows: All we are doing is looking at the time line [. . .] from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point when we collect the cash. And we are reducing that time line by removing the non-valueadded wastes.
As mentioned before, fulfilling the customer’s needs is t
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