Congratulations on working on making your business Leaner. I've been working with "Lean" for many years, applying it all over the world, and simply it is a continuous improvement tool that identifies waste or inefficiencies, to create a better way of working. I would suggest that someone on your team (hopefully the team leader) is either an expert or proficient in facilitating the team, and would be an excellent support for your questions. There is a huge amount of information out in the Internet from the Quality sector (see recommendations below), for my distilled version the term "Lean" came about when American researches went to Toyota in the 1980's to understand why they made such better and cheaper cars than in the USA. Womack (the researcher) published his research in the book entitled "the machine that changed the world", all he could do was refer to the way Toyota made cars was "lean", with every process being so more efficient than what the Americans or Europeans could do. There is lots of books on the subject, most popular being the "Toyota Way" and the "Lean for Dummies", are of low cost and easily picked up from most big book shops. I would suggest looking up the Chartered Quality Institute's website (theCQI.org >Knowledge Hub>Tools and resources>Factsheets>Continual improvement), the Toyota Production system (http://www.toyota-global.com/company/vision_philosophy/toyota_production_system/index.html) the six sigma website (http://www.isixsigma.com/ and have a look around the website). Good luck, its hard work, however the payback is huge.

Dont forget that much of what the Japanese initially learnt was via Englishmen & some Americans who were not being listened to in their home countries. Additionally the Japanese put their own philosophies of improvement etc in with the processes learnt Most importantly they invested today to help tomorrow a thing we generally [not everybody] do not do now we only think of immediate profit above all things!