ABSTRACT
Lean is about motivating and engaging employees in creating continuous improvement, in paying attention to waste in the production process and in creating more value for the customers and more earnings for the farm. Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. During the 1980s and 1990s, more and more people discovered Toyota’s success and started to copy their methods. Two scientists, Jim Womack and Dan Jones, went to Japan and researched for five years why Toyota was getting ahead of American car manufacturers. In 1984, they published the book The Future of the Automobile, where they demonstrated that the Japanese car manufacturer outperformed American manufacturers on all key ratios. One of the basic ideas in Lean became that all leaders should know what is happening on Gemba because this is where value is created, and problems arise.
