Lean Concept

The term Lean designates an integrated group of principles, techniques and tools that lead to permanent search of the perfection in the creation of value for the client (the designated continuous improvement). Its goal is to make the companies more competitive, through the bet on costs reduction, quality improvement and clients’ satisfaction increase. For that are respected some base principles related with the creation of understood value for the client and used several management tools in order to reduce waste and eliminate defects like Kanban, Value stream mapping (VSM), 5S methodology, Total Productive maintenance (TPM), Poka-Yoke, among others. Even though the majority of these tools having been initially developed to be used in industrial companies, is currently accepted its use in all type of organizations, whatever be the activities’ sectors on which they perform (bank, health services, retail, information technologies, etc.) or its dimension. It’s for that reason that the original expression “lean manufacturing” was gradually replaced by “lean thinking” and by “lean managing” or simply “lean”.

 

 

Translated from Portuguese by Susana Saraiva, Portuguese-English and English-Portuguese translation specialist. Contact: spams@sapo.pt.