Osage Industries considers itself a leader in the application of lean manufacturing techniques to small manufacturing firms. Osage is committed to implementing lean techniques in all of our partner companies to shrink lead time to customers, improve productivity by reducing waste of materials and labor, and improve product quality.
The ideas behind lean thinking were originally developed in Toyota's manufacturing operations - known as the Toyota Production System - and spread through its supply base in the 1970's, followed by its distribution and sales operations in the 1980's. The term was popularized in the seminal book The Machine that Changed the World (Womack, Jones & Roos, 1990), which clearly illustrated, for the first time, the significant performance gap between the Japanese and western automotive industries.
The book d described the key elements accounting for this superior performance as 'lean' because Japanese business methods used less of everything - human effort, capital investment, facilities, inventories and time - in their manufacturing, product development, parts supply and customer relations.
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