Lean in a Nutshell
(originally posted 2003 Dec. 31 on my old blog-site)On the Lean Development mailing list, John Roth summarizes the heart of Lean: (my emphasis)Lean is the opposite of fat, and the only basic principle of lean thinking is to eliminate waste. As the saying goes, all else is commentary, or at least an elaboration on that one basic thought: find a faster, better, cheaper way to add value to the product, and do it at all scales, from the total, end to end process on down to the individual practices used to construct it.[...] In manufacturing, the first exercise i