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Getting people involved from the start was the primary force behind lean.

Ono, considered the founder of the Toyota Production System, realized that big inventories made manufacturers reluctant to change. If customers wanted changes, it meant waiting until the next production cycle.

But Ono saw that if inventories were kept small, essentially allowing manufacturing teams to respond quickly to new demands in the marketplace, those demands could be met quickly and help serve to identify and eliminate waste.

As the philosophy took hold it was expanded to reduce various forms of waste and increase efficiency. Unlike older manufacturing plants, where like machines were grouped into departments, lean design meant creating "process cells," where multiple components of a product were produced. The result: less downtime spent moving finished parts from one section of a plant to another.

Ono and Toyota in post WWII Japan didn't have much choice if they had any chance of becoming competitive. Japan's economy was decimated, its infrastructure in tatters. Initially, machinery at Toyota had to be adaptable to perform various functions, and waste had to be minimized, experts say.

Waste reduction is more than saving materials and money. It is fundamental if a company is to institute positive change. Kropf says a key element of Toyota's approach is the well-known "kaizen," literally meaning "improvement," but in the lean context, the word has come to mean implementing change in small increments, identifying waste by forcing problems to surface so everyone can see them. When problems are clear, they can be solved.

Simple enough, yet Kropf says that means a fundamental change in the way a company approaches its work. Kaizen requires workers to lead the charge for change while supervisors, engineers and managers fulfill a team member role. Action can take place on the shop floor without hours of analysis and the over-involvement of top management. Mistakes are addressed as they come up, and team members develop problem-solving techniques while gaining trust in each other, Kropf says.

Workers learn to multi-task and do more with less. They solve their own problems.

There's more. The kaizen mindset imposes three commonly prescribed rules: Spend no money, add no people, and add no space. Often, this translates into reducing costs, space requirements and production cycle time. In some plants, workers rig home-made tools fashioned from inexpensive products to assist with lifting or shifting weights and design their own systems for moving products down the line.

"You don't go into this with the idea of cutting jobs," says Csokasy. "And the outcome hopefully is such that you'll be more productive, have a higher quality product, and people will want to buy from you. That means more work coming into the plant, and because you're more efficient, it may mean you need fewer employees but don't lose any jobs."

In fact, Csokasy says that the companies that have had the most success implementing lean processes offer a guarantee that no one will lose their job due to layoffs.

Still, major obstacles have to be overcome in the American workforce for the lean regime to take hold across a broad spectrum of U.S. companies.