Blackwell Reference Online

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The original International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP) report into the performance of the global motor industry “revealed” the existence of a 2 : 1 difference in productivity between car assembly plants in Japan and those in the West. The performance differential was ascribed to “lean production” practices that improved productivity through reduced lead times, material and staff costs, increased quality, and so on. These findings led to a great deal of industry “soul searching” and, perhaps inevitably, further benchmarking studies which appeared to confirm the initial IMVP results. Given such a backdrop, it is unsurprising that lean production practices aroused such intense interest. Enhanced productivity has universal appeal, regardless of whether it is Toyota seeking to survive the oil price shock of 1972–3 or any western manufacturer faced with increasingly intensive global competition. Indeed, lean production's originators (and transcribers) were able, by formulating the “operating problem” as an unceasing battle against waste (or muda in Japanese), to make it seem almost axiomatic that lean implied better. Since the original IMVP report, high‐profile journal articles ( Womack and Jones, 1994 ), another book ( Womack and Jones, 1996 ), and annual “Global Lean Summits” have continued the portrayal of lean production as a more or less universal set of management principles ... log in or subscribe to read full text