Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Absolute Elimination of Waste

“The basis of the Toyota production system is the absolute elimination of waste.”
Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System, 1988

As business leaders and lean practitioners, we can easily grasp the “elimination of waste” concept. It’s really common sense. What we tend to skip over and where we fall short is the “absolute” part. Absolute, meaning without limitation, total, complete, entire, infinite, full, unrestricted, unconditional, unbounded, utter, unmitigated, thorough, and wholehearted.

The absolute elimination of waste approach is one great challenge!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Waste elimination to my extent is a culture you want to perceive, enforce and must follow but totally unreasonable when it comes to goal setting specially when talking about lean initiatives. For example if you understand the wastes you perfectly understand how pull system becomes a controlled one. Now if you take examples like that out of the equation, “Absolute Elimination of Waste” a great challenge in deed.

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