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ABSTRACT:
MOVING ON - BEYOND LEAN THINKING. Lean Construction Journal, Volume 1, issue 1 (October 2004).
Lauri
Koskela1
1The University of Salford, School of Construction &
Property Management, Salford M7 1NU, United Kingdom, E-mail: l.j.koskela@salford.ac.uk
Lean Thinking is currently often positioned as
the underlying theory of lean production among practitioners and academics,
although its originators, Womack and Jones, seem not to have presented it
as a theory. This paper
endeavors to analyze whether Lean Thinking can be viewed as a theory of
lean production. For this purpose, a critical assessment of Lean Thinking
is carried out. Lean Thinking is argued to lack an adequate
conceptualization of production, which has led to imprecise concepts, such
as the term “value”. The five principles of Lean Thinking do
not orderly cover value generation, and they do not always encapsulate the
core topics in their respective areas. The failure to trace the origin of
lean concepts and principles reduces the opportunity to justify and explain
them. Despite claims for generality, the application area of the five lean
principles is limited to the transformation of mass production, with, for
instance, one-of-a-kind production and construction being largely out of
scope. It is concluded that it
is opportune to move on beyond Lean Thinking, towards a generic theory of
production, for acquiring a solid foundation for designing, operating and
improving production systems.
KEYWORDS:
Lean production theory; Lean Thinking.
Paper in PDF
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