Lean thinking - what's it all about?

摘要

Let's face it: the overwhelming proportion of fruit and vegetables ends up either in the supermarkets or food processing factories. And these two business sectors are all getting pretty excited about "lean" thinking. So, it stands to reason that leanwill soon become part of your vocabulary, if it hasn't done so yet. For the uninitiated, lean is a term coined by Toyota in its manufacturing operations in the 1970s but rapidly spread through to other parts of the operation and then to its suppliers inthe early 1980s. It was driven by Toyota seeking to improve the efficiency of its business operations. Lean is so called because the Toyota business methods used less of everything: human effort, capital investment, inventories and time - in manufacturing, product development, parts supply and customer relations.