Lean manufacturing in the context of "Continuous improvement"

An entrepôt (English: /ˈɒntrəpoʊ/ ON-trə-poh; French: [ɑ̃tʁəpo] ) is a transshipment port, city, or trading post where merchandise may be imported, stored, or traded, usually to be exported again. Entrepôt also means 'warehouse' in modern French, and is derived from the Latin roots inter 'between' + positum 'position', literally 'that which is placed between'. Typically located on a crossroads, river, canal, or maritime trade route these trade hubs played a critical role in trade during the age of sail. Modern logistics, supply chain networks, and border controls have largely made entrepôts obsolete, or reduced them in number, but the term is still used to refer to duty-free ports or those with a high volume of re-export trade.

Railways, Container Ships, Air-Freight, and Telecommunications have created a world in which commodities and manufactured goods are shifted from one part of the globe to another in regular, controlled, and reliable streams; see Just-in-Time Manufacturing. Eliminating the factors which once made the entrepot phenomenon central to trade networks. But, as pointed out by the Dutch economist T.P. van der Kooy and has been more recently restated by P.W. Klein, before the Industrial Revolution the flow of goods from one part of the world to another, even one region of a country to another, was so irregular and unpredictable that there was no possibility of achieving any sort of steady distribution, any balancing of supply and demand, or any sort of price stability except by stockpiling great reserves of commodities in central storehouses; ie entrepots.

Muda (無駄; on'yomi reading, ateji) is a Japanese word meaning "futility", "uselessness", or "wastefulness", and is a key concept in lean process thinking such as in the Toyota Production System (TPS), denoting one of three types of deviation from optimal allocation of resources. The other types are known by the Japanese terms mura ("unevenness") and muri ("overload"). Waste in this context refers to the wasting of time or resources rather than wasteful by-products and should not be confused with waste reduction.

From an end-customer's point of view, value-added work is any activity that produces goods or provides a service for which a customer is willing to pay; muda is any constraint or impediment that causes waste to occur.

Cycle time variation is a metric and philosophy for continuous improvement in business, aiming to reduce variations in the time it takes to produce successive units on a production line. The process supports organizations' application of lean manufacturing or lean production by eliminating wasteful expenditure of resources.

It is distinguished from some of the more common applications by its different focus of creating a structure for progressively reducing the sources of internal variation that leads to workarounds and disruption causing these wastes to accumulate in the first place. Although it is often used as an indicator of lean progress, its use promotes a structured approach to reducing disruption that impacts efficiency, quality, and value.