(V012T13A062) THE MOBIUS STRIP OF LEAN ENGINEERING AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

摘要

Lean Engineering has come a long way from its first conception in the 1940s. What started as a production philosophy to enable manufacturing in Japan under severe resource constraints has developed into a globally adopted, widely aspired, often misinterpreted, and sometimes poorly understood, way and means of "doing business". Short-sighted implementations of lean engineering in industrialized countries in a first wave in the 1970s were quickly accompanied by the slogan 'lean is mean' because of the focus on short-term financial gains at the expense of a complete understanding of the entire production and value chains. In a second wave in the 1990s, the focus of lean engineering implementations shifted to the core objective of lean engineering philosophies, the establishment of flow in the value chain through standardization. In parallel, Systems Engineering has continuously developed as a discipline which has moved away from the integration of components and subsystems, to the co-development of such units and building blocks of engineering and engineered products. This continued development of Systems Engineering as a discipline reflects the growing demand for systems thinking competency, to challenge the complexity of manufacturing and operations in an environment where product development, production and distribution is spread over large, not co-located teams on all continents.