Lean Manufacturing

Is the production of goods using less of everything compared to mass production: less human effort, less manufacturing space, less investment in tools, and less engineering time to develop a new product.

Lean manufacturing is a generic process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System but also from other sources. It is renowned for its focus on reduction of the original 'Eight deadly Wastes' in order to improve overall customer value.

Lean is often linked with Six Sigma because of that methodology's emphasis on reduction of process variation (or its converse smoothness) and combined usage. Steady growth from a small player to the most valuable and the biggest car company in the world Toyota has focused attention upon how it has achieved this, making "Lean" a hot topic in management science in the first decade of the 21^st century.