This is a description of lean thinking. It was written for the Lean Production course as part of the MBA program at UMSL.
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Brief Description of Lean Thinking
Briefly describe Womack and Jones' concept of lean production. How is it similar to the Ideal Production System Framework for lean production, and how is it different?
Lean Thinking by James Womack and Daniel Jones defines lean production as simply doing more with less. To accomplish this goal, the authors describe five key components of lean thinking: value, value stream, flow, pull, and perfection. Value is the benefit the customer receives from the product. The authors challenge the readers to rethink value in terms of the customer for the product as a whole. This holistic thinking carries over to the value stream. The authors describe the value stream as any steps necessary to produce the product. They emphasize mapping out the entire stream including suppliers and distributors and finding steps that do create direct value to the customer. Steps that do not create immediate value are considered muda, or waste, and should be eliminated. The authors introduce the concept of flow and pull as means for the product to move through the system. The idea of pull proports that no product upstream should be produced unless it is requested downstream. Pull and reduction of waste lead to the concept of flow. In a perfectly lean environment, a product is said to flow through the system. The final principle of lean production is perfection. The authors say that a lean system does not compete against tradition competition, it competes agains perfection.
The authors' ideas about lean production are very similar to the Ideal Production System Framework. Both concepts use perfection as a measure of the success. The authors of Lean Thinking contend that a business should compete against perfection. Similarly, the baseline for the Ideal Production System framework is the ideal, or perfect, system. In addition, both concepts focus on the reduction of waste in the supply chain. In the Lean Thinking text, this is done by looking at the value chain and removing actions that do not create direct value to the customer. In the Ideal Production System Framework, waste is reduced by looking at the ideal solution and bringing the current implementation closer to the ideal. The main difference between the two concepts is in approach. The Lean Thinking text uses a more bottom-up approach. It begins at the customer and then works up to the value chain. The Ideal Production System, however, is top-down in the sense that it first focuses on the value chain to provide value to the customer.