The Lean Revolution

Taiichi Ōno and the Toyota Production System radically changed industrial production. Instead of focusing on the minimization of costs through the production of high quantities as Henry Ford did, the objective of Taiichi Ono was to align the production to what the market effectively required and to strive for the maximum efficiency in producing that. Before we can study how Lean ideas can be transferred to the software engineering field, we have to look at the ideas behind Lean. In this chapter we will look at the starting point for Taiichi Ono, i.e., industrial production as Henry Ford organized it. We present what Womack and Jones call the five steps to enact Lean Thinking and describe the ideas behind each step. We begin the chapter with a short historical account on different management methods that evolved in the past in warfare to show that methods need to be adapted to the specific context.