1. Introduction

Increased awareness of Lean has resulted in a plethora of “how-do-Lean” literature and a conundrum of Lean definitions, with little emphasis beyond this transactional process and outcome focus. This chapter will begin to explore how the Lean concept has shifted from a technical production system focus to an all-encompassing organisational philosophy. A valued definition coupled with a brief outline of the scope of this book will be provided. A Lean organisation understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal was to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste. To accomplish this, Lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimising separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimising the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers. Eliminating waste along entire value streams, instead of at isolated points, creates processes that need less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time to make products and services at far less costs and with much fewer defects, compared with traditional business systems. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, low cost, and with very fast throughput times. Likewise, information management becomes much simpler and more accurate.