ABSTRACT
The term lean was first coined by John Krafcik-now president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America-in 1988. Krafcik, who was researching the comparative performance of automotive assembly in Japan versus the West, used the term to describe Toyota’s ability to do much more with much less1 in his master’s degree dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The term lean was later popularized by Womack and Jones, especially in their seminal book The Machine that Changed the World.2 That machine was, of course, the Toyota Production System. The benchmark studies presented in this bestseller highlighted a substantial gap between the Japanese automakers-especially Toyota-and the rest of the world, in terms of both quality and productivity. For example, they observed that the number of hours it took to build a Lexus was less than the time spent to rework a topof-the-line luxury German car at the end of the production line after it was manufactured.3 Rather counterintuitively, they also found a strong correlation between higher productivity and better quality, meaning that achieving bestin-class quality does not require extra effort such as rework at the end of the production line. Far from it, in fact, carmakers with the highest productivity were also best in quality. At last, quality was proven to be free, exactly as the quality gurus of 1960s and 1970s preached.
