From the course: Construction Management: Introduction to Lean Construction
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A brief history
From the course: Construction Management: Introduction to Lean Construction
A brief history
- Let's start with a look at where lean came from. In the manufacturing industry, some referred to lean as the Toyota production system or just the Toyota way because that's where it originated. The world had seen great value in the assembly line theory of production but the problem was there was little ability to vary the product coming off of the assembly line. They were all the same. Changes required long periods of time to retool and recreate the process. Engineers at Toyota envisioned a different theory of production. One that shifted its focus away from the individual machines and their individual roles in the process over to the actual flow of the product through the entire process. They concluded that they could take steps to change the process that resulted in the ability to quickly change the setup or the process in order to rapidly produce small batches of different parts to meet the demands of different customers. They developed a process that enabled each step to notify…