The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles From the World's Greatest Manufacturer

by Jeffrey K. Liker

In other words, Toyota's solutions to particular problems often seem to add waste rather than eliminate it. The reason for these seemingly paradoxical solutions is that Ohno had learned from his experiences walking the shop floor a very particular meaning of non-valued-added waste: it had little to do with running labor and equipment as hard as possible, and everything to do with the manner in which raw material is transformed into a saleable commodity. For Ohno, the purpose of his journey through the shop floor was to identify activities that added value to raw material, and get rid of everything else. He learned to map the value stream of the raw material moving to a finished product that the customer was willing to pay for. This was a radically different approach from the mass production thinking of merely identifying, enumerating, and eliminating the wasted time and effort in the existing production processes.