A Brief History of Lean

Lean originated in Japan in the years following the Second World War, from the very late 1940s. Born in Toyota’s automotive factories, this production system was studied and gradually christened the Toyota Production System (TPS) around the 1980s/1990s.

TPS aims to eliminate waste and produce on a just-in-time basis. More fundamentally, it involves creating a learning system within the company—one that enables everyone to continuously acquire the knowledge needed to improve quality and reduce production lead times.

Lean is built on two pillars: just-in-time on the one hand, and jidoka on the other.

There is a wealth of high-quality resources on Lean, both in the literature and online. evryg intends to share its own experience of implementing Lean here—both internally, in its development as a company in France, and on large-scale IT projects for its clients.

You will notice, on reading these pages, that agile software development is intimately linked to Lean. This approach to development, which emerged in the 1990s, gave birth in 2001 to the Agile Software Development Manifesto. The DevOps culture, a term dating from 2009, is simply the application of Lean to IT.