Lean management

Concept

A management approach derived from the Toyota Production System that creates more value for customers with fewer resources by removing waste, improving flow and involving the people who do the work in continuous improvement.

Description

Lean management comes from the Toyota Production System. Its starting point is value: what the customer is willing to pay for. Everything else in a process is waste or necessary support, and lean tries to shrink it by improving flow, pulling work through the process only when it is needed and fixing problems at their source.

Lean is not only a toolbox. It also describes how leaders work: they go to the place where the work happens, support teams in solving problems and build a habit of small, steady improvement. Typical methods are value stream mapping, standard work, 5S, kanban and kaizen. Lean originated in manufacturing, but the ideas are used in logistics, healthcare, offices and software as well.

Related topics in brief

• iFAKT GmbH · Related to · Organization
  Stuttgart-based consulting company and software specialist for Industry 4.0, founded in 2001, that helps manufacturers plan and optimize production and logistics processes; developer of the Polaris software.
• Polaris VSM · Related to · Product
  Module of iFAKT Polaris for data-based value stream mapping that models material and information flows collaboratively and makes waste and bottlenecks visible.
• Value stream mapping · Related to · Concept
  A lean method for visualizing how material, information and decisions flow through a product family, including process steps, queues and handoffs.
• Kaizen · Related to · Concept
  A lean practice of small, practical improvements made close to the work, often run as short kaizen events or workshops by the people who run the process.
• Continuous improvement · Related to · Concept
  An ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes incrementally over time; applied here to cloud operations where monitoring signals trigger funded, owned actions.
• Manufacturing · Related to · Industry
  The industry that turns raw materials and components into physical goods, from single parts to series production, in factories and workshops.
• Gemba walk · Related to · Concept
  A lean management routine in which leaders go to the place where the work happens, observe the process and ask the people doing it questions, to see problems first-hand and support improvement.
• Operational excellence · Related to · Concept
  A management discipline that aims to make a company's operations reliably efficient and customer-focused through shared principles, standard routines, performance measures and continuous improvement at every level.
• Shop floor management · Related to · Concept
  A routine for steering production where the work happens: visual boards, short daily meetings, performance indicators and structured follow-up of problems, so teams and managers react to deviations the same day.
• Takt time · Related to · Concept
  The pace at which a product must be completed to meet customer demand, calculated as the available production time divided by the customer demand in the same period.
• Kanban · Related to · Concept
  A pull system from lean in which visual signals, often cards, tell a process when to produce or move more parts, so work in progress stays limited and production follows actual consumption.
• 5S · Related to · Concept
  A workplace organization method with five steps (sort, set in order, shine, standardize, sustain) that keeps tools and materials in their place, makes problems visible and supports safe, efficient work.
• SMED · Related to · Concept
  A method for shortening changeover and setup times on machines by separating the work that needs the machine to be stopped from the work that can be done while it runs, and then simplifying both.
• Heijunka · Related to · Concept
  A lean method that levels production by volume and mix over time, so a plant follows a steady, repeating pattern instead of swings in orders, which reduces stock, overtime and lead time.

Glossary

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Experts on related topics

• Mirko Peters · via iFAKT GmbH

Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-11