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FAQ : The Historical Development of Lean Manufacturing?

The Timeline of Lean Manufacturing:

1926 - Sakichi Toyoda patents Toyoda Automatic Loom with Non-Stop Shuttle-change motion

1936 - Kiichiro Toyoda (Sakichi’s son) starts Toyota (then called Toyoda) using Sakichi’s JIT principles

1956 - Taiichi Ohno introduced kanban techniques into the Toyota Production System

1970 - Toyota trains its suppliers in JIT

1975 - JIT spreads across Japanese companies

1980 - West studies Japanese companies

1983 - Canada and Europe show interest

1985 - Adopted by pioneering companies in the west

• Lucas
• Black and Decker
• Hewlett Packard
• Knowles
• York
• Formica

1990 - The Machine that Changed the World (James P Womack, Daniel T Jones & Daniel Roos) re-named JIT "Lean Manufacturing"

For more information on the techniques see World Class Manufacturing e-book.