What is the importance of lean manufacturing ?

The very shot answer is Operational Excellence!

Each Company has its set of competitive advantages. Competitive advantage could be in terms of sales, marketing, financials or sourcing. However, operations are sometimes are perceived as execution of one or more of those advantage. Example: Marketing to select the "right" products and production has to fulfill this target. 

Toyota Production System played a great role to change this concept. Now companies can use operations (Production, inventory management, quality, Maintenance,... etc) to create competitive advantage that can integrate to other company advantage. Example: Toyota changed the automotive industry by challenging the Lead Time and Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) by challenging its "wastes" . Toyota could change its die-change time from12 hours to10 mins so that they could achieve less overproduction, defects, inventory, rework. 

This could be achieved not only by introducing a set of tools like (SMED/5S/ Visual Management/ Kanban/... etc) but also by getting each mind  of the company including top management and operators to see and eliminate waste and focus on value adding activities only.

Now we see non automotive companies compete through operations such as MacDonald "fastest delivery".

Through operational excellence A company can achieve:

• Less operating cost by removing non value adding activities.
• Shorter Lead times
• Less MOQ
• High productivity, high availability.
• And, on top of the above, getting each mind involved in improvement. 

IndustryWeek’s competition for best plants showed that90% of finalists and winners were adopting Lean manufacturing.

Hope this answers your question.

reference:

http://www.industryweek.com/companies-amp-executives/lean-confusion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-Minute_Exchange_of_Die

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste.

Typically Lean will improve;

• Quality performance, fewer defects and rework (in house and at customer).
• Fewer Machine and Process Breakdowns.
• Lower levels of Inventory.
• Greater levels of Stock Turnover.
• Less Space Required.
• Higher efficiencies, more output per man hour.
• Improved delivery performance.
• Faster Development.
• Greater Customer Satisfaction.
• Improved employee morale and involvement.
• Improved Supplier Relations.
• HIGHER PROFITS!
• INCREASED BUSINESS!

adding value to outputs and reducing the inputs to the optimal and rise resources efficiency 

My friend, being similar is nothing. All shareholders and executive managers ask a way/method to differ their organization. The importance of lean is in this point.

The most common, well understood and approved method for this purpose is Lean. This is the importance.

The important thing in my opinion is that it gave more control to the waste that generate during the production line, which mean that profit is increase since the raw material cost is decrease.

I would like to add that Lean is important for an organization as it helps reduce costs of production and in turn keeps the organization's edge in today's highly competitive market.

leads to optimum utilisation of resourses and reduction or elimination of wastes in every production setup.inventry movement becomes perfect (MUDA,MURI)

Lean manufacturing relates to minimization of waste in production process and creating value for customers.

Lean manufacturing involves the following

• JIT (Just in Time) manufacturing
• Pull demand ,knowledge management
• TQM (Total Quality Management )
• kaizen approach which involves continuous development

To keep the non value adding activity at very minimal level and increase the value adding activity