About Us
About Us
The lean systems program is a university-industry partnership initiated by Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky’s president, Fujio Cho, in 1994 to systematically explore, study, and teach the workings of the Toyota Production System (TPS).
For over a decade, we’ve been transferring our understanding of Toyota’s approach – what we call “lean systems” — into practical working strategies. Our goal is to provide critical skill sets for leadership teams, management teams, and associates throughout the organization.
What are Lean Systems?
Lean is a way to lower operating costs by cutting wastes of all kinds. But it’s not just a toolkit. Although concepts such as kanban, 5s, kaizen and so on are often discussed as if they could be applied in isolation, true lean practitioners soon realize that lean can’t be successfully applied piecemeal.
That is, there’s no point in solving a problem here, then creating something twice as bad ten feet away. Or trying to implement lean on the production floor without the necessary lean accounting and human resources approaches to support it. Doing lean successfully means seeing (and solving problems) in your operations from a systems perspective.
