lean thinking courses

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, "Lean," is a production

practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value 

for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective

 of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action or process that

 a customer would be willing to pay for.

Essentially, lean is centered on preserving value with less work. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS) (hence the term Toyotism is also prevalent) and identified as "Lean" only in the 1990s. TPS is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original

 Toyota seven wastes to improve overall customer value, but there are varying perspectives on how

 this is best achieved. The steady growth of Toyota, from a small company to the world's largest automaker,

 has focused attention on how it has achieved this.

Lean manufacturing is a variation on the theme of efficiency based on optimizing flow; it is a present-day instance of the recurring theme in human history toward increasing efficiency, decreasing waste, 

and using empirical methods to decide what matters, rather than uncritically accepting pre-existing ideas.

 As such, it is a chapter in the larger narrative that also includes such ideas as the folk wisdom of thrift,

 time and motion study, Taylorism, the Efficiency Movement, and Fordism. Lean manufacturing is often 

seen as a more refined version of earlier efficiency efforts, building upon the work of earlier leaders such as 

Taylor or Ford, and learning from their mistakes.