Lean manufacturing or lean production, often simply “lean“, is a systematic method for the elimination of waste (“Muda“) within a manufacturing system. Lean also takes into account waste created through overburden (“Muri“) and waste created through unevenness in work loads (“Mura“). Working from the perspective of the client who consumes a product or service, “value” is any action or process that a customer would be willing to pay for. (wikipedia)
Simply put, Lean is the continuous elimination of “waste” from any system to achieve better performance.
Lean delivers on all the three important elements of business performance, i.e., Quality, Cost and Speed.