Lean Security

Most security practitioners have heard the word lean in its most common context of Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production — a set of principles for improving product quality while lowering cost and production time. The term Lean Manufacturing evolved from the Toyota Production System (TPS), which is an adaptation of Total Quality Management (TQM), continuous process improvement, or Kaizen, and a number of other principles focused at reducing costs, improving quality, reduction of rework and speeding up cycle.

The growth of Toyota from a small company to the world’s largest automaker is directly attributable to its thorough application of quality principles. As one would expect, Toyota’s success has generated tremendous interest in these methods, which have been captured in methodologies such as Six Sigma, Continuous Process Improvement, and Least Waste Way, as well as Lean Manufacturing. The 1996 book “Lean Thinking” popularized lean principles by presenting the case studies of a number of well-known firms who transformed their production capabilities and enhanced profitability by the application of lean principles. One of the key elements of Lean focuses on “design for manufacturability,” which involves designing products properly from the beginning to reduce the complexity of manufacturing the product.

Originally known as the Toyota Production Method, over 60 years Toyota’s application of process improvement has evolved beyond manufacturing and is now referred to as the Toyota Business System (TBS). The business processes of any administrative, production or service activity can be significantly improved using lean concepts. Lean is a way of improving critical business processes that impact customer satisfaction and operational excellence. Thus, the outstanding results that many companies have achieved applying Lean Manufacturing have inspired additional applications of lean including those now known as Lean Healthcare, Lean Laboratory, Lean Software Development, Lean Government, Lean Office and finally Lean Enterprise.

What might surprise you is that Toyota’s success can actually be traced back to the efforts of two American quality gurus — Joseph Juran and W. Edwards Deming — who were brought to post-war Japan by General Douglas MacArthur to assist the Japanese in rebuilding their economy through teaching the virtues of TQM.