Lean as the name suggest is the production of products or services using the least of everything - human effort, investment in inventory, machines, space, tools, time, development, transport / movement. The term is called Lean, Lean Manufacturing and Lean Enterprise all meaning the same thing and deriving from the Toyota Production system and some other sources. It is however very simply the reduction of waste from your processes it has enabled Toyota to become one of the biggest and most reliable car companies in the world.

Lean is therefore Lean Training the identification and steady elimination of waste through the implementation of perfect first time quality approaches to work, standardisation of processes, smoothing of flow, flexibility of work, long term relationships with customers and supplies and reduction in time leading to cost reduction and business improvement. To achieve this a number of tools have been developed which facilitate the removal of waste from processes and a number of methodologies to implement the principles.

In organisations where the principles of Lean are fully understood the people use the tools and techniques with out thought as eliminating waste and improving flow become the norm. Lean in its many guises has been around since the 1940's and has developed and adapted over the years to become one of the key business improvement methodologies used in many of the worlds leading companies. At its heart lean is effectively simple and easy to understand. Lean implementation is therefore focused on getting the right things, to the right place, at the right time, in the right quantity to achieve perfect work flow while minimizing waste and inventor while being flexible and able to change if the customer requirements change.

However, no matter how simple, at the heart of any lean implementation is the cultural and managerial aspects of Lean which are just as, and possibly more, important than the actual tools or methodologies of lean itself. There are many examples of Lean tool implementation without sustained benefit and these are often blamed on weak understanding of Lean in the organisation.

The first concept which must be understood is that waste is bad. This has been the ethos for successful companies from Henry Ford onwards. So what is waste?

Waste or non value added work is anything which doesn't add value to your product or service. When you examine your processes in real detail you discover that the vast majority of what we do is non value added. To illustrate this Shigeo Shingo (a deep lean thinker) observed 'that it's only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it - the rest is just movement'. If we review everything we do to this extent we see that most of our activities are waste. To eliminate waste we must examine three aspects - the design and planning of our activities, the fluctuation at our operations such as quality and volume and thirdly the waste in our processes themselves in the movement of people and materials and the machines they use.

When you examine your processes in this way you can be said to be 'learning to see' and can start to eliminate the waste and improve the processes. To make things easier there are 7 ways to think about waste.