This is a production method that aims to make business’ processes faster. Lean means that the processes become agile, without surplus and non-value activities. In spite of being a method originally designed for manufacturing processes, “truth is that the lessons learned from this methodology can be universally applied. Lean manufacturing principles can help your business processes gain efficiencies and, as a result, become more effective and competitive in any marketplace” (Landau, 2019, projectmanager.com).
Lean “takes its roots from manufacturing best-practices that were implemented in the Toyota Motor Corporation, such as Just in Time (JIT) management, Quality Management (QM), Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)”. From there, Lean has had an important evolution and has come to be mixed with methodologies such as six sigma or Jidoka (Davim, 2018).
The basic idea of Lean Manufacturing is to identify and eliminate all the activities that are considered to be a waste because they don’t add any value to the processes in the company. With this purpose, a continual inspection is made, on processes, personnel, kind of activities; and decisions are made on how the overall process can be improved and how the waste elements can be eliminated, because, according to many researchers, when this process of inspection in not deployed regularly, there is about 60% of waste activities in business processes. Technology is a key element for supporting these improvement processes.