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What Is Lean?
Jody Muelaner posted 2019-08-22

Lean is a type of manufacturing

and a way of organizing a
business. It is both a philosophy
and a collection of speci c
methods. Many people are
familiar with the individual
methods, but pinning down the
essence of lean can be more
dif cult. In this article, I’ll explain
how lean came about, what its
core philosophy is and how the
different methods t into its
fundamental principles.
Where Does the Term Lean
Come From?

In the 1980s, American and

European manufacturers were
struggling to compete with
Japan. Japanese productivity
was much higher, and nobody in
the West understood why. In
1984, MIT was given funding for a
ve-year study to understand
how automotive production
methods differed around the
world. This project, the
International Motor Vehicle
Program (IMVP), involved two
stages: First identify all the
operations required to build a
car, and then visit manufacturers
all around the world to
understand how they performed
these operations.

The IMVP found that the Toyota

Production System (TPS) was
considerably more ef cient than
other manufacturing systems,
and its principles were already
being adopted by many
Japanese companies. These
principles were unknown in the
West at the time. The
researchers called them lean.
They described their ndings in
the book The Machine that
Changed the World and asserted
that lean could be
transformational in every
industry around the world.

The Toyota Production

System

To understand the essence of

the lean philosophy, it is best to
start by understanding how it
came about. In the period
immediately following the
Second World War, Japanese
manufacturing was nding it
very hard to compete. Toyota
was a small car manufacturer
run by the Toyoda family. In 1950,
Eiji Toyoda went on a fact-
nding mission at Ford’s Detroit
plant. This factory was producing
more cars in one day than Toyota
had ever produced. Eiji saw that
they could not compete directly
by adopting mass production,
but he also identi ed a lot of
waste within Ford’s approach.
For starters, Toyota had to
produce small batches of
different types of vehicle.
Additionally, the strong unions in
Japan would not accept the
harsh working practices that
immigrants to America were
subjected to. However, the
biggest problem was that to
compete using mass production
required massive capital
investment.
Ford was using 300 stamping
machines for each model of car,
with each machine setup to
stamp one of the cars body
panels. One of those machines
was a serious investment for
Toyota. There was no way they
could afford to buy enough
machines to make all of the
different vehicles required in the
Japanese market. When Eiji
explained this problem to his
chief engineer, Taiichi Ohno, he
came up with a simple solution.
If they could dramatically reduce
the tool change time on the
stamping machines, they could
produce all the panels on just a
few machines. They would
produce a small batch of each
panel in turn. They developed a
system of rollers and adjustment
screws to enable these tool
changes. Over a 10-year period,
this reduced the changeover
time from a day to just three
minutes.

By reducing changeovers to a
negligible time, they were able
to achieve the same ef ciency as
a larger plant with much lower
capital investment and smaller
production volume. Surprisingly,
there were other bene ts that
meant they could actually make
cars more cheaply than the
larger factories. First, they didn’t
have the cost of carrying
inventory. Most signi cantly,
quality was improved. Because
the machine operators were
much more intimately involved
in machine setup, they detected
any errors much more quickly
and were able to correct
mistakes almost instantly.

The foundations of the Toyota

Production System (TPS) had
been laid. Flexible machines
kept the ef ciency of machine-
made interchangeable parts but
were not operated by unskilled
workers doing repetitive jobs.
Instead, skilled workers were
engaged in a range of tasks
making many different
components, as well as setting
machines, checking for quality
and identifying the root cause of
any defects. Anyone who wasn’t
adding value to the product
started to be viewed as “muda”—
waste. Jobs such as inspector,
foreman, cleaner and repair man
were all replaced by exible
teams of production workers.
These teams were responsible
for their section of the assembly
line, including doing their own
cleaning, repairs and quality
checking. The team leader
worked with the team to
produce parts and complete
subsidiary functions.
Toyota adopted the principle of
transferring responsibility to
those adding value throughout
its business. Subcontractors
were organized into tiers so
Toyota only dealt directly with
“tier 1” suppliers. The tier 1
suppliers were responsible for
managing tier 2 suppliers and
often also for the design of
complete sub-systems. Since the
sales force were the ones
generating the sales, which
involved day-to-day contact with
customers, they were given
responsibility for gathering
marketing data about
customers’ preferences.

Ohno continued to look for

sources of waste in the
production system. He saw that
if a defective part was allowed to
continue down the production
line, then the mistake would be
repeated, increasing the waste.
The only way to avoid this was to
deal with the problem
immediately. Every worker was
told to look for defects and given
access to a cord that would stop
the entire production line. When
a worker encountered a problem
they couldn’t immediately x,
they would stop the line. The
whole team would then come
together to x the problem. They
would ask the ve whys—a
simple technique to identify the
root cause. Once the root cause
was identi ed, they would look
at how it could be eliminated so
the same problem would not
happen again, a process they
called “poka yoke,” meaning
failure proo ng.

A simple example of pokayoke is a

socket that will not accept a plug in
the wrong orientation.

Beyond Division of Labor

From the beginnings of human

civilization up until the birth of
lean manufacturing, there has
been a consistent trend toward
the division of labor and
increasing specialization of the
workforce. Lean bucks this
trends with its emphasis on
teamwork and shared
responsibility.

The rst division of labor, seen in

even the earliest societies, could
be considered to be that
between “men’s work” and
“women’s work”. As societies
became organized into larger
cities and nations, the division of
labor continued with the
emergence of distinct
professions such as farmers,
craftsmen, merchants, priests
and rulers. Initially, goods were
made by skilled craftsmen who
were able to produce a complete
product using highly adaptable
tools. However, as early as 370 BC
Xenophon wrote of increasing
specialization leading to greater
productivity.

“In a small city the same man

must make beds and chairs and
ploughs and tables, and often
build houses as well; and indeed
he will be only too glad if he can
nd enough employers in all
trades to keep him. Now it is
impossible that a single man
working at a dozen crafts can do
them all well; but in the great
cities, owing to the wide
demand for each particular
thing, a single craft will suf ce
for a means of livelihood, and
often enough even a single
department of that; there are
shoe-makers who will only make
sandals for men and others only
for women. Or one artisan will
get his living merely by stitching
shoes, another by cutting them
out, a third by shaping the upper
leathers, and a fourth will do
nothing but t the parts
together. Necessarily the man
who spends all his time and
trouble on the smallest task will
do that task the
best.”Cyropaedia: the education
of Cyrus, Xenophon c370 BC.

The division of labor was

increased signi cantly during
the industrial revolution. Special-
purpose production machinery
enabled repetitive tasks carried
out by unskilled works to
replicate the work of skilled
craftsmen. This type of highly
specialized division of labor is
famously described in 18 th
century pin production by Adam
Smith, although he noted that in
more complex industries, “the
labor can neither be so much
subdivided, nor reduced to so
great a simplicity of operation.”

The armory practice

manufacturers in America
replaced the senor craftsmen
who had previously maintained
quality with inspectors,
maintenance engineers and
foremen who didn’t actually
make anything themselves. Mass
production took the division of
labor to its ultimate conclusion
with unskilled assembly workers
each tting a single component
on a moving assembly line.

Lean manufacturing nally

breaks this trend, with skilled
teams of works all actively
engaged in producing a product,
as well as many subsidiary
functions such as maintaining
machines and checking quality.
It is only because of exible
automation that this can be
made ef cient. It is possible to
turn the normal view of lean on
its head and argue that nobody
is adding value in a lean factory
—the machines are doing all the
real work, and the people are
purely doing the non-value
added functions such as
maintenance, production
planning and quality
improvement.

A Brief History of Quality

Engineering

Lean uses statistical tools for

monitoring processes and
getting to the root cause of
problems. The origin of these
methods can be traced back to
before the Toyota Production
System. In fact, they have their
roots in American
manufacturing. Their
development really began with
American arms manufacturers in
the early 19 th century.

To cut a long story short,

American small-arms
manufacturers were some of the
rst to realize the bene ts of
interchangeable parts. By
making parts with consistent
dimensions, they were able to
replace skilled craftsmen with
machine tools, arranged in lines,
which would carry out
successive operations. Each
machine was set using gauges,
and parts were inspected at the
end of the line. This waswhen
quality started to be de ned in
terms of the dimensional
variation between parts.
In 1924, Walter Shewhart,
working at Weston Electric, sent
a one-page memo de ning all
the basic principles of Statistical
Process Control (SPC). He stated
that process variation could be
divided into chance causes,
which produced unavoidable
random variability and
assignable causes, causing
avoidable variability due to faults
in machinery, operator errors,
defects in materials, etc. He
de ned a process as being in
“statistical control” when
assignable causes were
negligible, and made achieving
this a fundamental aim of SPC.
He also showed how control
charts could be used to
graphically understand process
variation.

These SPC methods were

adopted within the US WWII
“War Standards.”W. Edwards
Deming, a student of Shewhart,
became the statistical advisor to
Japanese industry while under
the U.S. occupationin the 1950s
and 1960s. Many Japanese
manufacturers enthusiastically
adopted these methods. By the
1980s, they were more widely
used in Japan than in America.

Lean Today

According to Womack et al, the

lean plant has two key
organizational features, “It
transfers the maximum number
of tasks and responsibilities to
those workers actually adding
value to the car on the line, and
it has in place a system for
detecting defects that quickly
traces every problem, once
discovered, to its ultimate cause.”

Organizations that claim to be

lean often only pay lip service to
these ideals. Specialized
nonvalue-adding job functions
abound, and little real
responsibility is given to
production workers. It was once
a requirement that even the
most senior managers joining
Toyota had to spend two years
working hands-on the
production line. Many
companies now make this two
days at most. It is also very
unusual for production to stop
for a single defect.

Where the transfer of

responsibility has perhaps
remained strongest is within
supply chains. Prime
manufacturers only deal directly
with tier 1 suppliers who in turn
have complete responsibility of
managing their supply chain.
The tier 1 suppliers are also often
given considerable responsibility
of the design of components
and sub-systems, and the
development of manufacturing
processes.

Today, lean is often seen more in

terms of a set of methods for
eliminating waste through the
identi cation of defects causes
and error proo ng:

Heijunka (Level Scheduling):

The deliberate scheduling of
small batches, which requires
frequent machine changes but
reduces lead times and
inventory.
Single-Minute Exchange of Die
(SMED) : Systematic way of
reducing tool changeovers to
less than ten minutes.
Andon : A system used to notify
workers in a production area that
a fault has been detected. This
may be activated by a worker
pulling a cord or pushing a
button, or it may be
automatically triggered by a
production machine. This may
result in a red light ashing or a
siren sounding.
Root Cause Analysis: A method
used to get to the underlying
reason of why a problem
happened. For example, your car
might not start because the
battery is at, but the underlying
cause was a lack of
maintenance.
Five Whys: A simple method for
root cause analysis in which you
simply ask why did the fault
occur and then why did that
occur? You would normally get
to the root cause by the fth
“why” if not before. In the
example of your car not starting,
you might identify that the
battery is at because the
alternator is faulty, and that is
because you didn’t service the
car.
Poka-Yoke : Error proo ng a
process is normally carried out
after root cause analysis to
remove the cause.
Kaizen (Continuous
Improvement) : This is the
principle of working together to
incrementally improve the
process.
 Gemba : This term simply mean
the real place and is used to
remind workers to get out of the
of ce and visit the factory oor
where the real manufacturing is
happening.
Value Stream Mapping : A value
stream is made up of the steps
or processes required to turn raw
material into a product of value
to the customer. Mapping this
value stream means drawing it
as a single diagram. This gives
valuable insight and can be used
to remove non value adding
operations.
Five S : A way of organizing the
workplace in ve steps, normally
translated from Japanese as sort,
set in order, shine, standardize
and sustain. It aims to reduce
wasted time lost by hunting for
tools and being distracted by
unnecessary items.
Kanban : A way of scheduling
work using a board with work
cards. Kanban is the Japanese
word for a sign or billboard. The
term Kanban Board is often used
in the West. Kanban is a pull
system and simple visual way of
avoiding excessive buildup of
work.
Control Chart : A graphical way
of viewing variation in
production processes and
identifying when a process is
going “out of control,” signifying
that products will soon be out of
speci cation. This is one of the
methods that has been adopted
from the earlier practice of
Statistical Process Control.

There isn’t time to go into detail

about all of these methods in
this article, but look out for
future articles were I will explain
each method in full.

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