What Is Lean Six Sigma? Key Terms Lean Six Sigma A process improvement methodology that integrates the waste-elimination philosophy of Lean Manufacturing (derived from the Toyota Production System) with the statistical defect-reduction rigour of Six Sigma (developed at Motorola). Together, they address both speed (Lean) and quality (Six Sigma) simultaneously, producing faster, more reliable processes…
Lean Manufacturing Tools: The Essential Toolkit for Waste Elimination
What Are Lean Manufacturing Tools? Key Terms Lean Manufacturing Tools Practical techniques and frameworks used to implement Lean principles — identifying waste, improving flow, building quality into processes, and sustaining improvements over time. No single tool constitutes “Lean”; rather, the tools are applied selectively based on the specific waste or flow problem being addressed. Tool…
Lean Manufacturing Principles: The Five Pillars of Lean Explained
What Are the Five Lean Manufacturing Principles? Key Terms Lean Manufacturing Principles The five foundational concepts identified by Womack and Jones in Lean Thinking (1996) that define how a Lean operating system functions. They provide the strategic roadmap for implementing Lean: not as a set of tools, but as a coherent philosophy of continuous value…
Lean Kaizen: The Japanese Philosophy of Continuous Improvement
What Is Kaizen? Key Terms Kaizen A Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement, meaning “change for the better” (改善 — Kai = change, Zen = good/better). In a Lean context, Kaizen describes both the philosophy of ongoing, incremental improvement involving all employees at every level, and the event format (typically a 3–5 day focused improvement workshop)…
Lean Flow: How to Increase Throughput, Speed, and Competitive Advantage
What Is Lean Flow? Key Terms Lean Flow The continuous, uninterrupted movement of a product, service, or information through a value stream from first step to customer delivery, without stopping, batching, or queuing. Flow is the third of Womack and Jones’s five Lean principles — following Value and Value Stream — and represents the operational…
The 7 Wastes of Lean Manufacturing: How to Identify and Eliminate Them
What Are the 7 Wastes of Lean? Key Terms The 7 Wastes (Muda) Seven categories of non-value-adding activity identified by Taiichi Ohno within the Toyota Production System. “Muda” (無駄) is the Japanese term for futility or wastefulnes. Ohno argued that all waste in a production system falls into one of seven types — and that…
Lean Manufacturing: Definition, 5 Principles, and the 8 Wastes Explained
What Is Lean Manufacturing? Key Terms Lean Manufacturing A production philosophy and operational methodology, rooted in the Toyota Production System (TPS), that systematically identifies and eliminates waste from every step of a process in order to deliver maximum value to the customer with minimum resource expenditure. The term “Lean” was coined by James Womack, Daniel…
Lean Manufacturing: Improve Profit Margins Through Productivity Improvement
What Is Lean Manufacturing? Key Terms Lean Manufacturing A production and operations philosophy, originating in the Toyota Production System, that seeks to deliver maximum customer value with minimum waste. Every process step, inventory holding, motion, waiting time, and defect that does not directly add customer value is a target for elimination. Lean is not a…
The Psychological Contract: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Breaks
What Is the Psychological Contract? Key Terms Psychological Contract The set of unwritten, informal, and largely implicit expectations, obligations, and beliefs that an employee holds about their relationship with their employer — and vice versa. First formalised by organisational psychologist Denise Rousseau (1989), the psychological contract captures the subjective understanding of what has been promised…
Herzberg Motivation Theory: Two-Factor Theory Explained for Managers
What Is Herzberg’s Motivation Theory? Key Terms Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory A motivation theory developed by psychologist Frederick Herzberg (1959), based on interviews with 203 accountants and engineers, which found that the factors causing job satisfaction are fundamentally different from the factors causing job dissatisfaction — not opposites on the same scale. Herzberg called these two…