| dc.description.abstract | Many aerospace enterprises and other organizations have adopted a variety of management approaches to
achieve continuous process improvement, enterprise change and transformation, such as the lean enterprise system,
total quality management (TQM), theory of constraints (TOC), agile manufacturing, and business process reengineering
(BPR). Among them, the lean enterprise system, with its origins in the Toyota Production System (TPS),
comes closest to providing a holistic view of enterprises as complex socio-technical systems embodying a mutually
supportive set of precepts and practices driving enterprise operations at all levels (i.e., strategic, tactical, operational)
and throughout the enterprise value stream encompassing both upstream supplier networks and downstream customerfocused
activities. Lean enterprise principles and practices have evolved over many decades through a process of
experimentation, learning and adaptation. A distinction is made between the basic lean enterprise system (BLES),
capturing salient developments over the period between the late 1940s and mid-1990s, and the contemporary lean
enterprise system (CLES), capturing major conceptual and implementation-related extensions of the basic model since
the mid-1990s. The lean enterprise system, as a viable framework for explaining the structure and dynamics of modern
networked enterprises, for managing them, and for improving their performance through either continuous process
improvement or planned systemic change and transformation, remains a work-in-progress. | en_US |
