ABSTRACT
Production and Operations Management has seen many changes since it first emerged as an academic discipline. One of the most significant of these changes was the emergence of Lean Production and the worldwide interest in Japanese manufacturing processes. John Krafcik, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), first introduced the term “Lean Production” to the management lexicon (Krafcik 1988). Two years later, Womack et al. (1990) popularized it in the best-selling book The Machine That Changed the World, a book that is commonly referred to as the starting point of the Lean movement. In reality however, many of the concepts of Japanese manufacturing, the foundations of Lean, were already well established in the US by the early 1980s, albeit under different names. In The Machine That Changed the World, the authors contend that their findings revealed that there was a dramatic performance gap between Japanese and Western car producers and asserted that Lean production should be universally adopted, writing that “Our conclusion is simple: Lean production is a superior way for humans to make things. . . . It follows that the whole world should adopt Lean production, and as quickly as possible” (Womack et al. 1990, p. 225).
