The phenomenon of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and the term “Lean” have received much attention from researchers and especially practitioners over the past 40 years. As scholarly perspectives on these topics continue to evolve, we invited Wally Hopp and Mark Spearman to contribute an essay to the JOM Forum that became “The Lenses of Lean,” and we invited several other prominent authors affiliated with Lean to react to that article and share their perspectives on Lean. We are delighted to have received four such contributions, which we have assembled here with the hope of furthering this important conversation (Note: For consistency of exposition, we have capitalized the term “Lean” throughout these commentaries when it is used in the phenomenological sense). —Tyson Browning and Suzanne de Treville

The ideas that eventually became known as "lean production" were fully developed and implemented at Toyota in Japan by the late 1960s. And they were transferred to a few export-oriented manufacturing companies in Japan by this date as well. But their transfer to the USA awaited both a need and a means.

Business process and business process management concepts have matured over the years and new technology, concepts, standards, and solutions appear. In this chapter we will therefore focus on the current and future process trends. We will elaborate on the importance of trends, the maturity of the subject, giving a perspective on what the emerging trends, industry trends, and mega trends are, what is hyped at the moment, and what has reached a market adoption where it has started to become de facto standard in terms of a mega trend that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance.

This chapter of the book will elaborate on the move from process-centric work around labor and people to the coupling of information technology (IT) aspects with process modeling aspects. We witness a much wider and more profound involvement of IT with the incorporation of processes in business and organizations across geographical borders and cultural differences.

Lean production (LP) in China has more than 20 years of development history, but few enterprises have made significant achievement, especially in the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). SMEs play a vital role in the economic growth of developing countries, and pushing effective implementation of lean production in SMEs is significant. This paper aim to analyze the barriers to SMEs’ lean production practice based on the investigation of SMEs in Wenzhou and point out the countermeasures affecting effective implementation of lean manufacturing. Using a case study method approach, this paper examined the countermeasures how to carry out lean production effectively. The author concludes that SMEs should be provided from the following four organizational points of view, and they are the attention and involvement of senior managers, good communication platform, learning organization and the establishment of performance evaluation system.

This paper presents a case study on the procedures and practices of the new approach to agile programming which is named as scrum XL, Need for a new approach was identified in my earlier paper called “Agile Programming-A New Approach”[1] . The approaches mentioned in this paper were implemented in a real working environment. It explains the features that have been successfully put into practice. The strategy adopted for implementing the features is discussed. It gives a detailed report on the steps and results of the features that are stated.

When James Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos wrote THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD in 1990, Japanese automakers, and Toyota in particular, were making a strong showing by applying the principles of lean production. However, the full power of lean principles was unproven, and they had not been applied outside of the auto industry. Today, the power of lean production has been conclusively proved by Toyota's unparalleled success, and the concepts have been widely applied in many industries. Based on MIT's pioneering global study of industrial competition, THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD offers a groundbreaking analysis of the entire lean business system, including product development, supplier management, sales, service, and production - an analysis even more relevant today as GM and Ford struggle to survive and a wide range of British abd American companies embrace lean production. A new Foreword by the authors brings the story up to date and details how their predictions were right. As a result, this reissue of a classic is as insightful and instructive today as when it was first published.

The concept of “lean” has roots in mass production, originally in the automotive industry, and most famously, at Toyota, where Ford Motor’s original Rouge manufacturing complex was used as its benchmark. Toyota’s managers studied the text of Today and Tomorrow, a book written during 1926 by Henry Ford. Ford conceived the idea of a moving assembly line, after observing the meat packing plants in the Chicago stockyards. He recognized that the process of disassembling a hog or steer could be reversed to construct the automobile.

Los conceptos subyacentes al consumo eficiente se reducen a seis sencillos principios que se corresponden estrictamente con los de la produccion eficiente: Solucionar totalmente el problema del cliente, no malgastar el tiempo del cliente, ofrecer exactamente lo que el cliente quiere cuando lo quiere, donde lo quiere, y exactamente cuando lo quiere y anadir continuamente soluciones para reducir el tiempo y las molestias del cliente.

The paper examines the path of evolution in the automotive world from the beginnings of 100 years ago to the present crisis of economic and political fluctuations. The development of the world auto industry shows a clear pattern involving recurrent crises that have led to creative shifts, followed by renewed growth. Understanding this pattern provides a vital perspective of the current era which provides a starting point for a consideration of productive paths to the future.