Womack is founder and president of the Lean Enterprise Institute (www.lean.org), a non-profit organization based in Brookline, MA. Jones is founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute in the UK (www.lean.org.) a non-profit organization centered in Europe. Womack and Jones have co-authored several books that include Seeing the Whole, The Future of the Automobile, and most recently, a revised and updated edition of Lean Thinking. Roos is Associate Dean of Engineering for Engineering Systems, Professor of Civil Engineering, Japan Steel Industry Professor, and Director of the Cooperative Mobility Program at MIT. The Center is responsible for coordinating interdisciplinary technology and policy activities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After more than five years of research exploring the differences between mass production (use of “narrowly skilled professionals to design products made by unskilled or semiskilled workers tending expensive, single-purpose machines”) and lean production (to achieve and sustain perfection while using 50-70% less resources), Womack and Jones were convinced “that the principles of lean production can be applied equally in every industry across the globe and that the conversion to lean production will have a profound effect on human society–it will truly change the world.” It is important to note that when Womack, Jones, and Roos wrote this book in 1990, they and their research associates were involved with MIT’s International Motor Vehicle program (IMVP). One of their colleagues, John Krafcik, coined the term “lean.”
In this volume, the authors trace the evolution of lean production and then examine how it works in factory operations, product development, supply-system coordination, customer relations, and as a “total lean enterprise.” In the last two chapters, they explain how lean production is spreading across the world, to other industries, and in the process, “revolutionizing how we live and work.” In 1990 Womack, Jones, and Roos predicted “lean production will supplant both mass production and the remaining outposts of craft production in all areas of industrial endeavor to become the standard global production system of the twenty-first century.” Indeed, much of that had occurred by 1993 when Womack and Jones published Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, revised and updated in 2003.
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