Toyota Motor Corporation invented the methods and tools now widely known as lean (Lean is a term from Womack Jones and colleagues). The development of TPS was led by Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo. The driver was to produce a range of products of high quality but using absolute minimum of resources (as available in Japan 1945-1950s).
Ohno said that TPS is not a production system but is a management system that can be applied to any part of the organization and to any business. TPS is built on a scientific approach such as systematic root cause analysis; development of TPS is evolutionary.
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