<P> Levels of demand in the Post War economy of Japan were low and the focus of mass production on lowest cost per item via economies of scale therefore had little application . Having visited and seen supermarkets in the USA, Taiichi Ohno recognised the scheduling of work should not be driven by sales or production targets but by actual sales . Given the financial situation during this period, over-production had to be avoided and thus the notion of Pull (build to order rather than target driven Push) came to underpin production scheduling . </P> <P> It was with Taiichi Ohno at Toyota that these themes came together . He built on the already existing internal schools of thought and spread their breadth and use into what has now become the Toyota Production System (TPS). It is principally from the TPS (which was widely referred to in the 1980s as just - in - time manufacturing), but now including many other sources, that lean production is developing . Norman Bodek wrote the following in his foreword to a reprint of Ford's Today and Tomorrow: </P> <P> I was first introduced to the concepts of just - in - time (JIT) and the Toyota production system in 1980 . Subsequently I had the opportunity to witness its actual application at Toyota on one of our numerous Japanese study missions . There I met Mr. Taiichi Ohno, the system's creator . When bombarded with questions from our group on what inspired his thinking, he just laughed and said he learned it all from Henry Ford's book ." The scale, rigor and continuous learning aspects of TPS have made it a core concept of lean . </P> <P> Although the elimination of waste may seem like a simple and clear subject, it is noticeable that waste is often very conservatively identified . This then hugely reduces the potential of such an aim . The elimination of waste is the goal of lean, and Toyota defined three broad types of waste: muda, muri and mura; for many lean implementations this list shrinks to the first waste type only with reduced corresponding benefits . </P>

The heart of the house of lean production is