The history of lean and the who is who

Nothing is new in the world of continuous improvement except the notion that it will always be developing.

Some of the concepts you see here may be familiar to you, others will be new. We hope to set these into the context of what it means to have an overall lean business system.

In the early 1900’s the principles were discovered and for many years they were applied in an ad-hoc way until the 1940’s when Toyota began to systemize the application ultimately enabling global use of the same improvement approach.

You will see a number of people identified on the timeline and we will talk about a few of the key contributors in the following slides