Condensed History Of Lean Manufacturing

To help increase company profits U.S. manufacturing companies have always searched for efficient strategies that will help improve their output, reduce costs and establish a competitive position to increase their market share. Early attempts can be traced to Eli Whitney and Henry Ford.

Japanese manufacturers re-building after the World War 2 had a difficult time. for one, they had a limited amount of people, a limited amount of raw material and money. These problems, born out of necessity led to the development of lean manufacturing practices, which they called on just in time manufacturing.

Japanese manufacturing leaders like the Toyota Motor Company's Eiji Toyoda, Taiichi Ohno, and Shingeo Shingo developed a smart disciplined and process focused production system now known as the Toyota Production System, or lean production. Which incorporated The Ford production, Statistical Process Control and other techniques into a system that minimized the expenditure of resources that added no value to the product.

In 1990 James Womack wrote a book called "The Machine That Changed The World". Womack's book was a straightforward account of the history of automobile manufacturing combined with a study of Japanese, American, and European automotive assembly plants. The "lean manufacturing" theory was made popular in American factories in large part by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology study of the process from mass production toward production as written and described in Womack's book.

A new phrase was coined, as to which is now commonly referred to as "Lean Manufacturing."