Lean Philosophy

Main principle of this philosophy is to straighten the whole process along with the customer tact and demand. Produce the product which the customer has ordered in amount of customer's order, in time to customer's wish.
The strength of the Lean philosophy with its methods lies in the acceleration of the processes to meet the customer's demand.

The objectives of the consideration are of the material flow and flow of information. The reduction of the processing time is reached by rise of the flexibility of the resources and reduction of waste in the process.

Waste is defined as all activities which do not raise the value of the product and for which the customer is not willing to pay. The best known division of waste (Muda) was defined by Toyota (7 kinds), "TIMWOOD"

Transport
Inventory
Movement
Waiting
Overproduction
Overengineering
Defects

However, a division can be defined by enterprise itself if wanted.

The reduction of the waste offers an excellent combination with 6 Sigma methodologies for the improvement of the product quality and process quality.

Other principles of the Lean philosophy are:

Security, order, cleanliness at every workplace (5S.of the Kaizen, etc.)
Flow manufacturing (one-piece-flow, Kanban: card-, box-, e-Kanban, reduction of setup times with SMED - single minute exchange die, etc.)
Rise of quality (Poka Yoke, PDCA cycle, 5 x why, 6 m, cause-effect-diagram, etc.)
Visualisation (boards, Kanbanboards, marking of containers and boxes for storage, kpi, etc.)
Flexible, autonomous working teams (discussion of the daily demand, specific features, quality problems, etc.)
Will to strive for perfection and for constant improvement

After an analysis of the material flows and flows of information, as well as deviation of the customer orders the processes are optimized with the above mentioned methods.
For the analysis tools come up like

value stream mapping (vsm)
process function diagrams (pfd)
product synchronization (ps, mps)
as well as other different diagrams and other tools for the evaluation of data

and processes according to the situation.