Lean Manufacturing - or any other type of operation for that matter - is based on a very simple philosophy.

The objective is to remove waste so that the process can produce exactly what the customer wants, when they want it and at the lowest possible cost. Waste is identified and understood differently in lean philosophy to the way it is regarded in traditional mass production.

Lean thinking is systematic and synergistic (the whole is greater than the sum of the parts) while traditional thinking is more compartmentalised and with departments often competing for resources rather than collaborating.

Traditional cost accounting is often to blame for waste (and consequently cost) that goes unnoticed - for example purchasing might be told to reduce their costs by a certain percentage which they do by reducing the quality of the raw materials leading to reliability or quality issues in production. The purchasing department will have achieved their objective and met their KPI's but at the detriment of the system as a whole.

In lean manufacturing if a supplier was changed then it would occur in close consultation with the people who use the product and be done using the PDCS cycle for change - Plan Do Check Sustain. That is making sure that the result of the change is what was intended and that it is sustainable over the long term.

Establishing the philosophy of lean in a business is closely linked to the culture - you can not sustainably implementa lean philosophy and lean systems if you are unwilling to do what is necessary to change the culture, the way that performance it evaluated etc. For example one part of an operation may have to sub optimise their performance in order for the whole system to perform better in order to avoid creating waste such as excessive work in progress.

Traditional performance measures can be disincentives to cooperativebehaviour. To avoidthis whenimplementing leansenior management have to develop an understanding of the need to change their thinking about the business from on that is a collection of departments to a flow of value adding that incorporates various processes management by different functional areas who have to work together towards the objective - lowering overall cost, lowering throughput time per product and increasing quality and safety. and a willingness on their part to change they way they evaluate and drive performance if the way it has been done in the past drives behaviour that is detrimental to the system as a whole.