Lean Management

The term ‘lean’ was first used by the research team at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) International Motor Vehicle Program to describe Toyota’s production system during the late 1980s.40 The principles of this production system became the fundamentals of a management approach which aimed to help companies increase their productivity. Or in other words, they intended to provide a way for companies to deliver more with less – less human effort, less equipment, less time and less space – while at the same time to provide products and services that customer really want.
In the following chapters we aim to give an overview of this management method, called the Lean Management approach. In this introduction we will explore four topics. First, the Toyota Production System (TPS) will be introduced, where the basics of Lean Management were created. Second, the lean principles will be explained; this section aims to deliver insights in the core ideas of such a production system. Third, those guiding ideas will be depicted, which identify the lean corporations and which serve as leading corporate values. Last, the organizational aspects of lean corporations will be portrayed.

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