Lean Thinking is about making continuous improvements to enhance business performance.
A number of Continuous Improvement philosophies and techniques have evolved. These include, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Lean, Theory of Constraints (TOC),and 6-Sigma.
The application of these different philosophies has met with significantly varying degrees of success in causing sustainable performance improvement.
Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. It is important to understand these strengths and weaknesses and to understand there applicability in specific different business process types.
This is essentially what Lean Thinking sets out to achieve.
TPM
Focus is on the improvement of the performance of a piece of equipment
LEAN
Focus is on the interaction between processes
TOC
Recognizes that the performance of the whole system is limited by a single constraint, bottleneck or performance limiting factor.
