When we are talking to our students about lean we don't make difference between Lean Management and Lean production in terms of meaning of Lean. When we use term "lean management" we state that lean can be used in all other sectors - services, offices, .. and not only in production as student could conclude based on "Lean production" term.

I'd suggest you to give a look at the following papers, they may help you:

Hines, P., Holweg, M. and Rich, N. 2004. Learning to evolve - A review of contemporary lean thinking. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 24 (10), 994-1011;

Shah, R. and Ward, P.T., 2007. Defining and developing measures of lean production. Journal of Operations Management, 25 (4), 785-805;

Pettersen, J. 2009. Defining lean production: some conceptual and practical issues. The TQM Journal, 21 (2), 127-142.

I hope it might help,

regards.

Thank you Aleksandar Erceg and Giovanni Romagnoli for your comment and the papers about the topic .

Lean production and lean management are closely related management methods. The article "The genealogy of lean production", Journal of Operaions Managenment 2007, 25(2), pp. 420-437, illustrates the evolution of lean principles from the Toyota Production Systems (TPS) in the late 70s (Ohno T., 1978) to Lean Production in the late 80s (Womack et al., 1990) and Lean Thinking in the 90s (Womack and Jones, 1996) in details. Lean management is more than just a production management system. It is essentially an organisational management approach, in particular for human resources management, e.g. span of control, empowerment and workforce flexibility and performance management, e.g. continuous improvement (Kaizen).

In my opinion, one can not ignore/omit one relevant "dimension" of Lean: adding value to process/product/service/clients/stakeholders, in addition to Ruediger setence "objectives behind lean management and lean production are to do things better and faster, to avoid unnecessary tasks and to reduce waste of any kind in principle".

I would agree to Nuno Costa's comment, that it would be more effective to apply Lean philosophy and Technology to all dimensions of an Enterprise. From what I have noticed during Company visits so far, it seems that companies apply more often / more easily Lean Management than restructuring their old production facilities which seem to be kept rather often untouched as it is supposed to keep on working. All together I am surprised how often companies still use partially extreme old / old fashion equipment to manufacture their products.

Just concluded a research on lean manufacturing or production or management, which ever one you decide call it, read all of the papers mentioned above, what is apparent is the lack of congruence in the definitions surrounding the concept. Every author seem to have his own approach to the concept making it difficult to come to a point of uniformity. although this has its advantages to a curious researcher,it is inevitably distracting from the strong points of a very good concept.

>what is apparent is the lack of congruence in the definitions surrounding the concept

You are right! Written and oral discourse of researchers and practitioners does not rely on a generally accepted and documented lexicon. The unfortunate reality is that implicit or explicit definitions may vary from author to author, in a given context; from paper to paper, for a given author; or even from paragraph to paragraph, in a given paper.

See, as example, Messac, A., Chen, W., “The Engineering Design Discipline: Is its Confounding Lexicon Hindering its Evolution?" Journal of Engineering Evaluation and Cost Analysis, Decision-Based Design: Status & Promise, Vol. 3, 2000, pp. 67-83. available at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.25.8431&rep=rep1&type=pdf

I can only agree with Solomon and Costa - there is a lack of "lack of congruence in the definitions surrounding the concept"!

Extending on and sharpening of Costa's suggestion I offer the following: The core is "Lean thinking" or "Continuous Improvement". Both ways of naming it need to be implemented as culture which transcends the whole company (otherwise it won't be sustainable and successful). Lean Thinking / Continuous Improvement Culture consist of principles (which are implemented as behaviours). The main ones are (in equal importance / no order) :

* Elimination of Waste (Production / Process - "Lean Production")

* Customer Orientation (Quality, Value Add, Zero Defects - "Lean Services"),

* Enabling, Development & Improvement (empowering employees, developing skills, idea management, problem solving, coaching, Change Management - "Lean Management")

* Stability, Flexibility & Performance (Production, Process, Organisation, Value Add - "Lean Production" / "SixSigma")

These main principles are typically detailed in more specific ones (up to 20 depending on taste and company)

Coming back to Rüdiger's question: The only "difference in objectives" between several "Lean" Methods which really matters is whether they embrace the holistic approach of all the above principles ("Continuous Improvement Culture") or just want to optimise one aspect of the business (typically to achieve short term profits).

The latter one research has shown conclusively to be not successful and sustainable in the long run.

'Lean production' may be an application of 'lean management concept'/lean thinking  in manufacturing sector.

Lean is about efficiency and performance. Lean production involve improving the production performance by removing wastes, improving the value stream, eliminate/reduce the non-value added steps, increase the product flow, standardizing the workflow, improve productivity, eliminate inventory and consistently provide value to customers in terms of price, quality and delivery. So any improvement within the production.

Lean Management involve improvements within the management. It is the management techniques and the leadership development approaches that should help achieving the lean targets (eg. company's profitability and customer values). Example, the coaching Kata approach which present the Toyota innovative method of training and developing its leaders at all levels. It has been the Toyota approach of passing the improvement behavior to all employees throughout the organization. Lean management includes the motivational system, the training system, the way of aligning goals, plans and methods using approaches like Hoshin Kanri and much more.

I would like also to invite you to read this publication, I attached it. It is mainly about the lean management approaches & techniques.

Best regards.

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