John Krafcik, the man who is credited for coining the phrase
‘Lean Manufacturing’ is currently the chief Executive of Hyundai Motor America . He
joined Hyundai (a Korean family owned and run car company) in 2004 and has seen Hyundai’s (US ) market share increase by over 50% and now
controlling over 5 percent of the US market. In the UK Hyundai has a
3.5% market share.
Krafcik is a Stanford University Mechanical engineering
graduate and on leaving university his first job was selling solar water
heaters before going on to join Xerox. His first move into the automotive
industry came when he joined a joint venture between Toyota and General Motors (Mew United Motor
Manufacturing) building small cars for both companies. As part of this role he
was able to travel to the Toyota City in Japan where he saw for the manufacturing
methods employed by the Japanese. With these insights his next step was to get
a masters degree in management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT). While there he saw a job posted on a bulletin board working as a
researcher for James Womack, a respected leader in ‘auto plant productivity’ –
he got the post and was able to tour car plants worldwide researching
production methods.
It was in 1988 that Krafcik first used the phrase ‘Lean
Manufacturing’ in his article ‘Triumph of the Lean Production system’ in the Sloan
Management Review.
He used the term lean ‘because
it uses less of everything compared to mass production – half the human effort
in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools,
half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half to the time’
The other thing that sets lean apart from mass production is
the emphasis on continually reducing costs, and continually making the end
product better with fewer defects and more consistency.
To read more about the differences between mass production
and lean production read The Machine that
Changed the World: The story of Lean production – the book co-authored by
Jim Womack and that Krafcik was researching when he used for the first time the
phrase Lean Manufacturing.
Continua strives to continually improve its own services and
to help our clients work towards leaner methods of manufacturing.
