Lean Production

Lean production is the economics-of-production concept John Krafcik named in his 1988 MIT Sloan Management Review article Triumph of the Lean Production System, drawn from his MIT thesis research comparing automobile assembly plants worldwide, including his own experience as a quality engineer at NUMMI, the Toyota-General Motors joint venture in Fremont, California. Krafcik used lean to describe plants that achieved high productivity and quality with markedly less of everything Toyota's system treated as waste: inventory, buffer stock, indirect labor and job classifications, in contrast with the buffered mass-production model scientific management and Fordism had generalized earlier in the century. The concept entered mainstream economic and management theory after Krafcik's MIT colleagues James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos popularized it worldwide in their 1990 book The Machine That Changed the World, and it went on to reshape operations-management theory and industrial-economics accounts of how firms compete on production-system design rather than scale alone.