Jenei István

István Jenei: Lean transformation of hospital processes – Structuring foreign and Hungarian experiences,
PhD Dissertation, Corvinus University of Budapest, Doctoral School in Business Administration
The most important events and publications related to the origin and development
of Lean can be seen in Annex 10.1.
1.2. The bases of lean thinking
Lean production has evolved concurrently with the development of Toyota’s
production practice over the years. Surprisingly, the system was not recorded in writing
until 1965: it could only be learned from the practice of the plants (Holweg, 2007). Its
first English description was released in 1977 by Sugimori et al., followed by a series of
works devoted to the components of the system. Researchers, however, sketched several
variants of the system, even if they inspected the same company. Since the lean system
actually denoted Toyota’s continuously developing production (and management)
practice, it is virtually impossible to provide a precise and up-to-date description of the
system. Therefore, researchers and managers must content themselves with developing
their own interpretation of lean management based on past information.
What seems to be generally agreed by the researchers is that lean management has
a dual background: (i) firstly, the totality of tools, methodologies 5 observable in the
production organisation/management practice of the Toyota plants (kanban, SMED,
andon etc.), (ii) secondly, the philosophy and the principles which have led to the
emergence and continuous development of these tools (Shah - Ward, 2003; Hines et al.,
2004). The article by Hines et al. (2004) makes a clean distinction between the lean
production system, meaning the application of the (operational) tools designed for the
development/management of the production area, and the application of lean thinking as
a strategic approach (see Figure 3).
5 I will not give a detailed description of this tools and methodologies in this study. There are several
books available on the topic; it would be even lengthy to list them. In Hungarian there are several
consultant web pages, where exhaustive description can be found. Understanding can be obtained also
from the glossary of the Hungarian translation of Womack – Jones’ book, „Lean Thinking”: James P.
Womack – Daniel T. Jones (2009): Lean szemlélet, HVG Kiadó, Budapest. Of the tools important for this
study I provide a short description where it supports understanding the most.
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