Toyota's Holistic Approach To Waste Elimination

→ The Toyota Way: 14 Principles

→ Toyota Production System

Wastes (muda) are the activities and results to be eliminated.

→ Radical Improvement (Kaikaku): Kore 10 Tips

→ Kaizen Mindset

While the elimination of waste may seem like a clear subject in such environmental concepts as cleaner production, it is noticeable that waste is often very conservatively identified. This then hugely reduces the potential of such an aim. In → Lean Manufacturing, waste is any activity that consumes time, resources, or space but does not add any value to the product or service. Lean manufacturing is, in its most basic form, the systematic elimination of 7 wastes – overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, motion, over-processing, defective units – and the implementation of the concepts of continuous flow and customer pull.

A finer clarification of waste is key to establishing distinctions between value-adding activity, waste and non-value-adding work. Non-value adding work is waste that must be done under the present work conditions. One key is to measure, or estimate, the size of these wastes, to demonstrate the effect of the changes achieved and therefore the movement toward the goal.

→ Continuous Improvement Firm 

The "flow" (or smoothness) based approach aims to achieve Just -In-Time (JIT), by removing the variation caused by work scheduling and thereby provide a driver, rationale or target and priorities for implementation, using a variety of techniques. The effort to achieve JIT exposes many quality problems that are hidden by buffer stocks; by forcing smooth flow of only value-adding steps, these problems become visible and must be dealt with explicitly.

→ 8 Rules for Quality Management

→ Areas Targeted by TQM in Japan

The Three Broad Types of Waste

The elimination of waste is the goal of Lean. Toyota defined three broad types of waste: muri,  mura and muda.

Muri is all the unreasonable work that management imposes on workers and machines because of poor organization, such as carrying heavy weights, moving things around, dangerous tasks, even working significantly faster than usual. It is pushing a person or a machine beyond its natural limits. This may simply be asking a greater level of performance from a process than it can handle without taking shortcuts and informally modifying decision criteria. Muri also includes bad working conditions, and it will often push a resource to work harder than its natural limits.  Unreasonable work is almost always a cause of multiple variations.

Mura is the variation and inconsistency in quality and volume in both products and human conditions.

Muda is the Japanese word for waste. It specifies it specifies any human activity, which absorbs resources, but does not directly add customer value. These non-value-adding activities and results – overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, motion, over-processing, defective units – are to be eliminated.