Also called lean, Toyota Production System, TPS
What is lean manufacturing?
Running the plant so that anything the customer would not pay for gets found and removed.
What else it is called
- Other names
- lean, Toyota Production System, TPS
- In French
- production allégée
Related entries
Understanding lean manufacturing
A way of running production that treats anything not adding value for the customer as waste to be found and removed. It came out of Toyota in the decades after the Second World War, and American researchers studying the car industry in the 1980s gave it the name it has now.
The part that gets skipped is that the tools are the easy half. 5S, kanban and value stream mapping can all be installed in a plant whose managers still reward large batches, still measure machine utilization, and still punish the person who stops the line. Where that happens the tools get rolled back within two years, and the conclusion drawn is that lean does not work here.
In practice
Ask how a supervisor is measured before asking which tools a plant uses. If the measure is output per machine, large batches will win every argument no matter what is written on the boards.
Frequently asked
Does lean mean cutting staff?
No, and plants that use it that way get one round of savings and no more, because nobody will ever again point out a problem. The method depends on the people doing the work finding the waste, which they will not do if the reward is losing a colleague.
Where should a small plant start?
With one value stream, mapped as it actually runs, and one measure the whole plant agrees on. Starting with 5S is common and usually produces a tidier plant that ships no faster.