Skip to main content

Lean Thinking from Toyota Manufacturing to the Healthcare Sector- Crimson Publishers

Lean Thinking from Toyota Manufacturing to the Healthcare Sector- Crimson Publishers

Purpose: This paper aims to provide a historical overview of how lean thinking has transferred and spread from Toyota manufacturing to the healthcare sector. It aims to explain the origin of lean: how it is defined, the main tools, concepts, and principles behind it, provide some lean healthcare examples, and explore the differences between the manufacturing and healthcare systems.

Design/methodology/approach: The article reviews current literature for lean application in healthcare from five databases. More than 50 articles and books were considered according to a taxonomy suggested.

Findings: Lean originated from Toyota in the 1940s due to the need to increase production efficiency, specifically by reducing waste. Since then, lean has expanded to other industries and organisations, gradually advancing to services and, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, have also been used in the healthcare sector. While the philosophy was introduced to the world by Toyota, the term ‘lean’ was only introduced by Jon Krafcik in the late 1980s. Lean initially lacked an agreed-upon definition within the literature; any agreement reached was on the potential of lean thinking in the healthcare sector. Several lean tools and techniques were used by different organisations, mostly to reduce or eliminate waste. Some of the leading examples of lean healthcare include the United States of America’s (USA) Virginia Mason Medical Centre, Theda Care in Wisconsin (USA), Bolton Hospital in England, and the Saskatchewan health care system in Canada. Even with the encouraging success stories from adopting lean as a management approach, several challenges still remain. The healthcare sector differs greatly from the motor industry as hospitals are not factories, so the transition between the two is not straight forward.

Originality/Practical implications: This literature review is helpful for journal editors and reviewers, researchers in healthcare organisations and healthcare practitioners as it offers a comprehensive, historical overview of how lean thinking has transformed and spread from Toyota manufacturers to the healthcare sector. 

https://crimsonpublishers.com/rmes/fulltext/RMES.000697.php

For more open access journals in crimson publishers Please click on link: https://crimsonpublishers.com

For more articles on Research in Medical & Engineering Sciences Please click on link: https://crimsonpublishers.com/rmes/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ultra-Fast Detection of Loosened Bolts Based on Binary Image Processing- Crimson Publishers

Ultra-Fast Detection of Loosened Bolts Based on Binary Image Processing- CrimsonPublishers   In this paper, we offer a new method for detecting tight or loosened bolts based on image processing. The proposed method is independent of bolt appearances, and no height detector is needed. Firstly, several pictures are taken from the bolts in tight and different loosened states for training the system. After the training step, the status of the study bolts is processed by MATLAB software. By using image processing techniques including noise removal, Circular Hough Transform (CHT), transformation of colored images to grayscale, Otsu thresholding, binary complement of Otsu thresholding, enhancement of images with dilation structure element, and after calculating the area of the bolts, the decision about the states of the bolts can be accurately determined based on the number of zero pixels. The proposed method has the advantages of the low calculation process, very fast, and high preci...

Review of Long Term Turbidity Trends with Possible Reasons around the World | Crimson Publishers

Review of Long Term Turbidity Trends with Possible Reasons around the World by Ilknur Tuncer in Research in Medical & Engineering Sciences In this review, it was tried to summarize the long term turbidity trends in various environments around the world. It was found that there was a decreasing trend in water clarity for Baltic Sea, Dutch Wadden Sea, Black Sea, Adriatic Sea, Japanese coasts due to eutrophication, rapid industrialization, anthropogenic input, etc. throughout 1900s and when those effects were diminished as maintained in Norwegian and North Atlantic coasts by the introduction of waste treatment plants and the improvement of sewage systems, an increasing trend was obtained. Moreover, clear oceanic water intrusion into near shore regions also resulted in an increase in water clarity as seen in the coasts of Southern California. On the other hand, since coasts of Wales, UK consisted of inorganic sediments, rather than anthropogenic effects, wind was tested as...

Transformation of High-Energy Bonds in ATP- Crimson Publishers

Transformation of High-Energy Bonds in ATP by Korablev GА in Research in Medical & Engineering Sciences With the help of spatial-energy concept it is demonstrated that the formation and change of high-energy bonds in ATP take place at the functional transitions of valence-active orbitals of the system “phosphorus-oxygen”. These values of energy bonds are in accord with experimental and quantum mechanical data. https://crimsonpublishers.com/rmes/fulltext/RMES.000665.php For more open access journals in crimson publishers Please click on link: https://crimsonpublishers.com For more articles on Research in Medical & Engineering Sciences Please click on link: https://crimsonpublishers.com/rmes/