What is lean production? Perhaps the best way to describe this innovative production system is to contrast it with craft production and mass production, the two other methods humans have devised to make things. The craft producer uses highly skilled workers and simple but flexible tools to make exactly what the consumer asks for — one item at a time. Custom furniture, works of decorative art, and a few exotic cars provide current-day examples. We all love the idea of craft method — as automobiles once were exclusively — cost too much for most of us to afford. So mass production was developed at the beginning of the twentieth century as an alternative. The mass-producer uses narrowly skilled professionals to design products made by unskilled or semiskilled workers tending expensive, single purpose machines. These churn out standardized products in very high volume. Because the machinery costs so much and it is so intolerant of disruption, the mass-producer adds many buffers -- extra supplies, extra workers, and extra space — to assure smooth production. Because changing over to a new product costs even more, the mass-producer keeps standard designs in production for as long as possible. The result: the consumer gets lower costs but at the expense of variety and by means of work methods that most employees find boring and dispiriting. The lean producer, by contrast, combines the advantages of craft and mass production, while avoiding the high cost of the former and the rigidity of the latter. Toward this end, lean producers employ teams of multiskilled workers at levels of the organization and use highly flexible, increasingly automated machines to produce volumes of products in enormous variety. Lean production is 'lean' because it uses less of everything compared with mass production, half the human effort in the factory, half the manufacturing space, half the investment in tools, half the engineering hours to develop a new product in half the time. Also, it requires keeping far less than half the needed inventory on site, results in much fewer defects, and produces a greater and ever growing variety products. About the craft production, which of the following statements is NOT TRUE?