An Introduction to Lean Work Design

Preface

Overview of Proposed Book

The main concept of this book—Lean Work Design—comes directly from our view that lean operations result from how the work is designed. To have lean operations we must have a lean work design. Lean Work Design uses three existing theories of work design to study lean operations and to identify the principles involved in realizing lean operations. First, it relies on systems theory to conceptualize how lean operations differ from other work designs. Second, it uses Hopp and Spearman’s (2004) definition of lean as a system that buffers throughput against variance using minimal buffering costs, where these buffering costs are the cost of having an inventory buffer, a capacity buffer, and a lead time buffer. Third, ...