Dermot O'Rourke

Developed in the 1950s as a means to survive and compete against the giants of the automotive sector, lean manufacturing helped Toyota evolve from a small-volume producer (with little capital) to become a high-volume manufacturer in a process-rich environment. Toyota achieved this by using developments such as total production maintenance (TPM), just-in-time (JIT), Kanban, value stream mapping and Kaizen events.1 A summary of some of the lean terminology is shown in Table 1.

Introducing lean manufacturing into the pharma sector.