The foundations of the Lean approach date back more than a century to manufacturing processes and, in particular, the automotive industry. During the production of its famous Model T, Ford aimed to ramp up mass production and, to this end, sought to standardise work by facilitating the flow of production and the movement and replacement of various parts. Based on Ford's production concept, after the Second World War, the emerging Japanese manufacturer Toyota developed the Toyota Production System, which became so successful that by the 1980s, people were already talking about the end of American vehicle manufacturing. At the world's best technical university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, researchers led by Jim Womack, with significant government support, attempted to identify the factors behind the success of Japanese car manufacturers, the key to which is the Lean approach. In the Western world, the trio of authors Womack, Jones and Roos introduced the concept and described the operation of Lean systems in detail in their influential business bestseller published in 1990, whose title alone speaks volumes: The Machine That Changed the World (Womack, Jones and Roos, 1990).