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What is lean manufacturing?

‘Lean Thinking’ is currently one of the most successful business strategies for improving the competitiveness of organizations. About 60% of all US companies use Lean Manufacturing as the way to improve their operational processes and also in Europe Lean becomes more and more popular in many manufacturing and service organizations, resulting in many success stories.

Lean Manufacturing is based on the philosophy, concepts and tools of the Toyota Production System.

Jim Womack and Dan Jones, two university professors from the US and the UK, conducted a benchmarking study in the '90 in automotive industry and concluded that Toyota was really outperforming all other players in the market with regard to productivity, cost, quality and delivery performance. After a more thorough analysis, they realized that all tools and techniques that were used by Toyota are in fact universally applicable. Also in non-automotive factories they can provide a breakthrough in efficiency and competitiveness.


The basic philosophy of Lean Manufacturing is defining 'value' for the customer. Hence, all activities that are not adding any value in the eyes of the customer (but only creating costs) can be identified (these activities are denominated as 'waste').

However, Lean does not focus on individual processes, but wants to improve the complete value stream, which means all activities – both value-added and non-value-added - that are necessary to bring the product from raw material into the hands of the customer.

The purpose of Lean is to eliminate and reduce waste in your value streams in order for products to flow and to be produced only at the pull of the customer.

The most recent developments in the US and also in Western Europe now show that Lean Thinking can also be applied in administrative and supporting processes.