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Lean Thinking : Banish Waste And Create Wealth

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Authors of the book Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones, focus on Lean thinking, the five principles of Lean with details on how to implement these ideals in their text. Additionally it provides evidence as to how creating a Lean factory will boost productivity and reduce inventories. Womack and Jones define Lean thinking as providing “a way to make work more satisfying by providing immediate feedback on efforts to convert muda into value.” (Womack and Jones, 1996) Through this, the five principles were created. The Lean values that are used to reduce Muda, the Japanese word for waste, are addressed in the first part of the book as being: value, value stream, flow,…show more content…
When the waste is eliminated in the value stream, ideally, the steps would flow together without any stoppages. A few other items would need to be changed in order for production to flow smoothly. Those include: the elimination of specialized departments, smaller machines closer in proximity to one another if they are creating a single product, and redesigning the processes that have had extra steps or create stoppages. The next principle is pull. This is the “first visible effect of converting from departments and batches to product teams and flow” in which the amount of time that was needed for a product that would ordinarily take years to design. (Womack and Jones, 1996) With the concept of pull, customers are only delivered what they want, when it is asked for, instead of pushing the products at the customers and hoping for the best as they had previously done. By this logic, “no one upstream should produce a good or service until the customer downstream asks for it.” (Womack and Jones, 1996) Lastly in the principles comes perfection. The process of improvement is constant; there should always be pushes to improve and reduce more waste. The idea is that even if the company is more successful than the competition today, there is no plausible reason to settle; one day they will surpass the company. Even more importantly,
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