The concept of lean manufacturing traces its roots back to the assembly line system
instituted by Henry Ford to manufacture cars in the early 1900s (Womack and Jones,
2003). The basic idea was to produce cars quickly and efficiently at volume. After the
Second World War, Toyota visited and studied Ford’s manufacturing plants and made
adaptations to fit its lower volume, higher mix and lower resource constraints. It focused
on creating a continuously improving system that removed cost and waste while
improving quality in less time.
Due to the success of Toyota and other lean adherents, lean has been a very popular
research area. Moyano-Fuentes and Sacristán-Díaz (2012) noted in their literature