Lean Thinking is a business methodology which aims to provide a new way to think about how to organize human activities to deliver more benefits to society and value to individuals while eliminating waste.

The term Lean Thinking was coined by James P. Womack and Daniel T. Jones to capture the essence of their in-depth study of Toyota’s fabled Toyota Production System. Lean thinking is a new way of thinking any activity and seeing the waste inadvertently generated by the way the process is organized by focusing on the concepts of:

1. Value,
2. Value streams,
3. Flow,
4. Pull,
5. Perfection.

The aim of lean thinking is to create a lean enterprise, one that sustains growth by aligning customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction, and that offers innovative products or services profitably whilst minimizing unnecessary over-costs to customers, suppliers and the environment. The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to identify wasted time and effort in their own job and to better work together to improve processes by eliminating such waste, the resulting enterprise will deliver more value at less expense whilst developing every employee’s confidence, competence and ability to work with others.