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Lean Concepts
Work Today - and Did 100 Years Ago Lean's important contribution to IE has been to take the diverse techniques and "make them part of a system." Some say there's nothing new about lean or TPM; the fundamental concepts have been around forever. Actually it has been nearly 100 years for some of the basic tenets, according to Walton Hancock, professor emeritus of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. He notes that many of today's lean manufacturing concepts were spawned by Industrial Engineering (IE) ideas, some nearly 100 years old. He has an interesting take on some of the most significant
developments in IE since the turn of the century, their modern lean equivalents,
and, most importantly, how lean takes the ideas to the next level. The
table below summarizes these pre-lean concepts up to the 1950s.
Industry thought "automation was the cure to everything," said Hancock. Actually it "caused a lot of waste" as companies reacted to quality problems in supplied parts by keeping large parts inventories so automated equipment wouldn't stop. By the end of the 1960s, Toyota had worked out the major concepts of its lean production system. But the West would not begin learning about the Toyota Production System until about 1980. While IE supplied lean with some of its major concepts and equipped it with key tools, the relationship has not been all one way, said Hancock. Lean's important contribution to IE has been to take the diverse techniques and "make them part of a system." |
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