TPS is the next major evolution in efficient business processes after the mass production system invented by Henry Ford, and it has been documented, analyzed, and exported to companies across industries throughout the world. Outside of Toyota, TPS is often known as "lean" or "lean production," since these were the terms made popular in two best-selling books, The Machine That Changed the World (Womack, Jones, Roos, 1991) and Lean Thinking (Womack, Jones, 1996). The authors make it clear, however, that the foundation of their research on lean is TPS and Toyota's development of it.
