Nicola

“we concluded that lean thinking can be summarized in five principles: precisely specify value by specific product, identify the value stream for each product, make value flow without interruptions, let the customer pull value from the producer, and pursue perfection.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

“Taiichi Ohno blamed this batch-and-queue mode of thinking on civilization’s first farmers, who he claimed lost the one-thing-at-a-time wisdom of the hunter as they became obsessed with batches (the once-a-year harvest) and inventories (the grain depository).4 Or perhaps we’re simply born with batching thinking in our heads, along with many other “common sense” illusions—for example, that time is constant rather than relative or that space is straight rather than curved. But we all need to fight departmentalized, batch thinking because tasks can almost always be accomplished much more efficiently and accurately when the product is worked on continuously from raw material to finished good. In short, things work better when you focus on the product and its needs, rather than the organization or the equipment, so that all the activities needed to design, order, and provide a product occur in continuous flow.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

“We labeled this new way lean production because it does more and more with less and less.”
― James P. Womack, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation

“Amortization allows for occasional operations to have actual costs that exceed their amortized costs. Such operations are called expensive. Operations whose actual costs are less than their amortized costs are called cheap. Expensive operations decrease the accumulated savings and cheap operations increase it. The key to proving amortized bounds is to show that expensive operations occur only when the accumulated savings are sufficient to cover the remaining cost.”
― Chris Okasaki, Purely Functional Data Structures