Every organization is in business to make a positive difference in value. Value diminishes as waste increases. Hence optimum utilization of resources to produce maximum value remains desirable. A lot of organizations practice various methods to accomplish this; often resulting in not aceiving the desired results. Any system or process implemented must be in alliance with the organization's business practices. This is where the knowledge and experience of BDSi becomes crucial. We deesign processes to yield desired results without compromising the organization's business practices and the fundamental principles of the standard. Lean Manufacturing principles when implemented properly achieves organizational goals to eliminate waste and improve financial benifits. 

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination. Working from the perspective of the customer who consumes a product or service, "value" is defined as any action, product or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. Essentially, lean is centered on obtaining value for consumed resource. Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System (TPS).

Lean principles come from the Japanese manufacturing industry. The term was first coined by John Krafcik in a Fall 1988 article, "Triumph of the Lean Production System," published in the Sloan Management Review and based on his master's thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

 For many, Lean is the set of "tools" that assist in the identification and steady elimination of waste (muda). As waste is eliminated quality and value improves while production time and cost are reduced. Examples of such "tools" are Value Stream Mapping, Five S (house keeping), Kanban (pull systems), and poka-yoke (error-proofing).

There is a second approach to Lean Manufacturing, which is promoted by Toyota, in which the focus is upon improving the "flow" or smoothness of work, thereby steadily eliminating mura ("unevenness") through the system and not upon 'waste reduction'. Techniques to improve flow include production leveling, "pull" production (by means of Kanban) and the Heijunka box. The difference between these two approaches is not the goal itself, but rather the prime approach to achieving it. The implementation of smooth flow exposes quality problems that already existed, and thus waste reduction naturally happens as a consequence. The advantage claimed for this approach is that it naturally takes a system-wide perspective, whereas a waste focus sometimes wrongly assumes this perspective.

Both Lean and TPS can be seen as a loosely connected set of potentially competing principles whose goal is cost reduction by the elimination of waste. These principles include: Pull processing, Perfect first-time quality, Waste minimization, Continuous improvement, Flexibility, Building and maintaining a long term relationship with suppliers, Autonomation, Load leveling and Production flow and Visual control.

Toyota's view is that the main method of Lean is not the tools, but the reduction of three types of waste: muda ("non-value-adding work"), muri ("overburden"), and mura ("unevenness"), to expose problems systematically and to use the tools where the ideal cannot be achieved. From this perspective, the tools are workarounds adapted to different situations, which explains any apparent incoherence of the principles above.

Also known as the flexible mass production, the TPS has two pillar concepts: Just-In-Time (JIT) or "flow", and "autonomation" (smart automation). Adherents of the Toyota approach would say that the smooth flowing delivery of value achieves all the other improvements as side-effects. If production flows perfectly then there is no inventory; if customer valued features are the only ones produced, then product design is simplified and effort is only expended on features the customer values.

 The other of the two TPS pillars is the very human aspect of autonomation, whereby automation is achieved with a human touch. The "human touch" here meaning to automate so that the machines/systems are designed to aid humans in focusing on what the humans do best. This aims, for example, to give the machines enough intelligence to recognize when they are working abnormally and flag this for human attention. Thus, in this case, humans would not have to monitor normal production and only have to focus on abnormal, or fault, conditions.

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 being flexible and able to change. These concepts of flexibility and change are principally required to allow production leveling, using tools like SMED. The flexibility and ability to change are within bounds and not open-ended, and therefore often not expensive capability requirements.

Lean aims to make the work simple enough to understand, do and manage. To achieve these three goals at once there is a belief held by some that Toyota's mentoring process,(loosely called senpai and kohai, which is Japanese for senior and junior), is one of the best ways to foster Lean Thinking up and down the organizational structure.

While the elimination of waste may seem like a simple and clear subject it is noticeable that waste is often very conservatively identified. This then hugely reduces the potential of such an aim. The elimination of waste is the goal of Lean, and Toyota defined three broad types of waste: muda, muri and mura; it should be noted that for many Lean implementations this list shrinks to the first waste type only with corresponding benefits decrease. To illustrate the state of this thinking Shigeo Shingo observed that only the last turn of a bolt tightens it—the rest is just movement. This ever finer clarification of waste is key to establishing distinctions between value-adding activity, waste and non-value-adding work.^[16] Non-value adding work is waste that must be done under the present work conditions. One key is to measure, or estimate, the size of these wastes, to demonstrate the effect of the changes achieved and therefore the movement toward the goal.

The original seven muda are:

·         Transport (moving products that are not actually required to perform the processing)

·         Inventory (all components, work in process and finished product not being processed)

·         Motion (people or equipment moving or walking more than is required to perform the processing)

·         Waiting (waiting for the next production step)

·         Overproduction (production ahead of demand)

·         Over Processing (resulting from poor tool or product design creating activity)

·         Defects (the effort involved in inspecting for and fixing defects)

The five-step thought process for guiding the implementation of lean techniques is easy to remember, but not always easy to achieve:

1.       Specify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.

2.       Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.

3.       Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.

4.       As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.

5.       As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.