The genealogy of lean production

Abstract Lean production not only successfully challenged the accepted mass production practices in the automotive industry, significantly shifting the trade‐off between productivity and quality, but it also led to a rethinking of a wide range of manufacturing and service operations beyond the high‐volume repetitive manufacturing environment. The book ‘The machine that changed the World’ that introduced the term ‘lean production’ in 1990 has become one of the most widely cited references in operations management over the last decade. Despite the fact that the just‐in‐time (JIT) manufacturing concept had been known for almost a decade prior, the book played a key role in disseminating the concept outside of…

• AP
  Alfred P. Sloan Foundation