The lean production philosophy, since it emerged in the
1950s, has provided major competitive advantage to Japanese
manufacturing companies. Its benefits gradually became known
outside of Japan. In the 1980s, US manufacturing companies
began to convert their operations to implement lean production
techniques and, consequently, also improved their operations
dramatically (Womack and Jones 1996). Some lean production
techniques are: (1) Stopping the assembly line to immediately
repair quality defects; (2) Pulling materials through the
production system to meet specific customer demands; (3)
Reducing overall process cycle time by minimizing each
machine's change-over time; (4) Synchronizing and physically
aligning all steps in the production process; (5) Clearly
documenting, updating, and constantly reporting the status of all
process flows to all involved.