The term lean has come into use fairly recently, but the ideas behind it have a long history. In the 16th century, Venice, Italy was a major shipbuilding center. They would build a hull and launch it into a canal. As it moved through the canals, other components were added until the ship was finished. This was essentially a moving assembly line, and perhaps the first example of flow production. The First Industrial Revolution was centered around the textile industry in England. Automation was becoming common and working conditions were terrible. Long hours, child labor, and horrible workplace accidents were the norm. Matthew Boulton's Soho Factory took a different approach. It was a model of cleanliness and efficiency, child labor was not allowed, and benefits were provided for employees. Boulton was perhaps the first to really focus on the elimination of waste in processes. In the 19th century, a second Industrial Revolution occurred, this time it was centered in America. The use of tooling and jigs for manufacturing was a major shift in philosophy and led to the implementation of interchangeable parts by John H Hall and Eli Whitney. Late in the 19th century and early in the 20th century, Frederick Taylor created scientific management which included time studies and preventative maintenance. Frank Gilbreth developed the idea of process maps, externalized setups and motion studies, foundations for the Japanese idea of SMED. By 1908, in his Highland Park Plant, Henry Ford was building automobiles differently from other manufacturers. All parts were interchangeable and assembled into modular units, which were then assembled into the final automobile on a moving assembly line. Although there were other examples before this, Ford is sometimes credited with inventing the moving assembly line. This is probably the first widely known example of flow production. By focusing on flow and cycle time reduction, Henry Ford was able to reduce Model T labor time from 12 and a half hours to 1 and a half hours and, subsequently, reduce the price of the Model T from $825 in 1908, to $290 in the 1920s. He also increased wages in 1916 from $2.34 a day, which was the norm at the time, to $5 a day. He recognized that by doubling the wages of his employees, he created a whole new class of customers for his product. In the 1920s, Walter Shewhart developed many of the statistical techniques, such as statistical process control that we use today. Following Shewhart, W Edwards Deming emphasized continuous improvement, including his plan-do-check-act cycle, a systematic approach to continue his improvement. Around the same time, Joseph Juran defined the elements of a quality system and brought Pareto analysis to quality. In the early 1950s in the aftermath of World War II, Deming and Juran both went to Japan at the request of the State Department, to assist in rebuilding Japan. They taught these quality principles to the Japanese. Many Japanese firms adopted these ideas enthusiastically and continued to build on them. One of these companies was Toyota. The teachings of Deming and Juran were the beginning of the Toyota Production System. In the 1960s, Taiichi Ohno visited the US to study manufacturing systems. Instead, he came away with ideas from American grocery stores. He was impressed by their customer focus, and their simple systems of replenishment. This was the origin of his idea for kanban system. Also in the 1950s, the Japanese initiated a national quality prize, the Deming Prize, named in honor of W Edwards Deming. In 1989, James Womack from MIT took a team of researchers to Japan, to examine Japanese manufacturing methods. Upon return, they wrote a book mostly about the Toyota Production System, titled the Machine That Changed the World. In this book, they coined the term lean to refer to this methods. If you hear people talk about lean and the Toyota Production System, they're essentially the same thing. Like most quality approaches, lean began in manufacturing. But it's been successfully applied in other industries. The ideas of lean can be applied to nearly any business to improve customer focus and reduce cycle time and costs.