Towards an engineering community as driver and basic tool support for lean approaches in engineering projects

The use of modern production systems like the Toyota production system led to significant productivity gains in several industries. The methods and tools used in these production systems have mainly been applied to the mass production of goods. This raises the question if any of these methods and tools can also be applied to the engineering of complex systems. For that reason, this paper focuses on a set of criteria comparing a modern production system with the engineering of automation systems or other complex industrial systems. Based on these insights, this paper shows how the concept of an Engineering Community provides basic tool support to realize ideas from modern production systems in the field of engineering projects. This will be illustrated by several examples in order to show how these ideas can be implemented in practice.