To achieve these ends, Lean Manufacturing promotes a fundamental rethinking of how to produce and deliver goods and services and meet the above production challenges. Largely, this rethinking represents a fundamental paradigm shift from “batch and queue” mass production to production systems based on a product aligned “single-piece flow, pull production” system. Batch and queue systems involve mass- production of large inventories in advance, where each functional department is designed to minimize marginal unit cost through large production runs of similar product with minimal tooling changes. Batch and queue entails the use of large machines, large production.
