| About Lean |  |
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“Lean” is elimination of waste and efficient creation of enterprise value 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology History When Henry Ford introduced the first car in 1908, an industry was born. By 1926, Ford had 52 different businesses, operating 88 plants worldwide. In the 1970’s, Shigeo Shingo, the father of the Toyota Production System saw the genius in Ford’s functional system of mass production, but challenged large-lot production. He saw the product flow as determined by customer needs and realised the ideal solution for the Toyota Production System was to keep all materials continuously flowing. Anything that prevents the flow of material is Waste. Lean thinking is an ongoing process and the concept of continuous improvement has been a major thrust of the Lean production system that began with Toyota and continues to be central to Lean thinking. The implementation of Lean can dramatically boost productivity, whilst reducing errors, inventories, inventories, space requirements, time-to-market for new products and costs in general. This has proven to be superior to mass production and Waste simply cannot be tolerated in today’s competitive global economy. LEAN Lean is centred on the elimination of waste with the goal of creating value. To be customer driven all forms of waste must be eliminated and these include: overproduction, over processing, waiting, moving items, defects, inventory, unnecessary motion and unused employee creativity. Eliminating waste is important not solely with the aim of reducing costs but also to improve quality, safety and responsiveness to changing market requirements. To focus exclusively on creating value is insufficient, because many improvement opportunities occur following focused efforts to eliminate waste. A powerful method for this is value stream mapping, where all activities which are value added are captured in sequence through a given operation and whatever does not add value is considered as waste. Lean thinking involves both eliminating waste and identifying improvements. This means delivering what customers want and need, and enabling companies to improve the value of their goods and services as perceived by the customer. The LFI brings together world leading airlines, industry and academia partners to share information and promote Lean-based practices in aircraft operations. |
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