lunes, 11 de febrero de 2008

Lean Manufacturing

Lean manufacturing is the production of goods using less of everything compared to mass production: less waste, less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment in tools, and less engineering time to develop a new product. Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the War Manpower Commission which led to the Toyota Production System (TPS) and also from other sources. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original Toyota 'seven wastes' in order to improve overall customer value but has some key new perspectives on how to do this. Lean is often linked with Six Sigma because of that methodology's emphasis on reduction of process variation (or its converse smoothness) and Toyota's combined usage (with the TPS). Toyota's steady growth from a small player to the most valuable and the biggest car company in the world has focused attention upon how it has achieved this, making "Lean" a hot topic in management science in the first decade of the 21st century.
"Lean" is viewed by many as the latest management fad in the cost-reduction arena. It has for many the advantage of a very descriptive active name and has been, in many cases, used like any other cost reduction approach. This has meant that the "Lean" word can be found in many places, projects and proposals. This has meant that for many it has hit the same implementation other approaches (??) which has created a level of cynicism in some quarters about its effectiveness. However, there are enough high-profile high-success implementations (headed by Toyota) that attitudes to it are quite mixed overall.

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