It may trade under a rather prosaic title, but ‘lean manufacturing’ inspires a zeal that is positively revivalist in its fervour. It is Japanese by birth, and utterly Japanese in nature, managing to be complex and relentlessly demanding and, at the same time, elegantly simple. Doing it is not at all easy, but it does boil down to one imperious principle - ‘eliminate waste’.
Lean, as its adherents call it, is about speed and efficiency, though they would say it was far more complicated than that. While it was formulated in the Japanese automobile industry in the 1930s and 1940s, its acknowledged influences go back at least as far as Henry Ford. It was Ford who first integrated the production process, using interchangeable parts, standardised working and a moving production line. Some say he was the first practitioner of lean.
