What is the meaning of LEAN?

In addition to the above comments from Mohammed Asim Nehal. Lean management is mainly the pursuit of waste elimination in the processes. There 3 main categories of waste. They are Muda, Mura and Muri which are Japanese words.

Muda means useless and in lean management it means any action or situation that doesn't add value to the product or service and not required by the customer. It consists of 8 types of waste:

1. Defects or rework.

2. Over Production

3. Wating

4. Non-Utilized Talent

5. Transporation

6. Inventory

7. Motion

8. Extra Processing

To remember them you can use the acronym "DOWN-TIME".

Muri means overloading or creating burden. i.e when employees or machines are working more than they can and eventually break down or produce defective products.

Mura means an evenness in the process. This happens when there is an imbalance in the process. For example, a step may take 5 minutes, but the following step takes an hour. This, in turn, causes delays and creates extra WIP (Work In Process) inventory. 

While Muda can be easily spotted, Muri and Mura are more difficult.

LEAN means - thin,  To bend or slant away from the vertical.  To incline the weight of the body so as to be supported: leaning.

Lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources. A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

To accomplish this, lean thinking changes the focus of management from optimizing separate technologies, assets, and vertical departments to optimizing the flow of products and services through entire value streams that flow horizontally across technologies, assets, and departments to customers.

 Lean is a continuous improvident process .