Lean History

Lean history is not, the world was created then it ended, history with all of the fat taken out.. I am talking about the history of lean manufacturing, the thing I spoke about in my last post.

If you don't remember lean is that thing that gets you to concentrate on the customer's value and make it flow like a little stream through your factory, whilst chopping out all of the waste to make things truly efficient.. I guess this means that instead of your stream slowly meandering through your factory it will rush through delivering your product straight out the other side without delay..

The ideas behind lean are not new, some of the principles of lean such as interchangeable parts date back to manufacturing muskets and production lines were used by the British Royal Navy to build pulleys and boats (or are they ships?)

Lean began to really move at the beginning of the last century when Ford built his production line to build the model T. Along with people like Taylor and some fellow called Gilbreth who was the inspiration behind cheaper by the dozen, all sorts of ideas began to circulate about measuring peoples efficiency and looking at the motion within their work, people were rapidly being turned into robots to repeat the same work over and over again as quickly as possible..

World war 2 arrived and Ford and some small aircraft manufacturer Boeing were trying to produce bombers the way they made cars, trying to manufacture one every hour..

After world war 2 things began to really change, the US decided to export all of it's crackpot business and quality gurus to Japan to help with building their economy there as it had had a slight set back..

Toyota, looking at what Ford had already done realised that they had to use not just Ford's principles but the ideas of Juran, Deming and all of the others that we sent there, added to their own observations about inventory being the biggest waste they began to develop the Toyota Production System..

Not long after the west began to notice that they were not making cheap plastic toys anymore but they were actually begging to dominate the automotive and other markets, people began to try to discover why, going off to visit and bring back ideas.

Lean was born in 1990 with the publication of "the machine that changed the world" a book that showed how Toyota had become the most efficient car producer.

Lean manufacturing finally arrived in the west and we have been trying to implement it ever since, the trouble is too many business owners think that they don't need lean or any other Japanese inspired fad so they ignore these ideas.. and thus they begin to slip behind.. further and further behind..

It is useful to understand the history if you want to implement it, history of lean manufacturing is a useful place to look..

QG.