ABSTRACT
At the time of writing, it is more than one quarter-century since the term ‘‘lean production’’ was
first introduced to the management lexicon by John Krafcik, a researcher from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT), who was working on the International Motor Vehicle Program
(IMVP) (Krafcik, 1988). Womack, Jones, and Roos later popularized lean in the bestselling book
The Machine that Changed the World. However, it was Richard Schonberger and Robert Hall who
wrote the two books, in 1982 and 1983 respectively, that effectively launched (or relaunched)
the concept that became known as lean production in the West. Schonberger (2007) noted that
while The Machine that Changed the World is commonly perceived to mark the beginning of the
lean movement, in reality lean manufacturing was actually already well established in the US in
the early 1980s, albeit under different names.
