Developing Taiichi Ohno’s Mental Model for Waste Identification in Nontraditional Applications

The growth of technology in the manufacturing domain is compelling industry to digitally transform with little to no guidance on what constitutes value-added and nonvalue-added data and information. However, the Toyota production system (TPS) approach, which has proven successful for decades in identifying wastes in physical manufacturing processes, can provide some insights. Extensive research has been conducted on the history of Toyota and the concepts and tools of the TPS, but there is no documentation of how Taiichi Ohno approached problems and developed the classification of wastes (the 7 Wastes) which led to the concepts and tools for continuous improvement that are collectively called the TPS. This article deconstructs literature on Ohno and the Toyota story to reconstruct the mental model that Ohno used to identify and categorize physical production waste in Toyota’s manufacturing operations. The mental model attributed to Ohno proposed in this work is then generalized into a framework for identifying and eliminating both physical and nonphysical wastes in systems. Manufacturing companies and researchers can utilize the framework to foster the same thinking that Ohno used to identify nonvalue-added activities in production processes. Applying the described framework to data and information flows will allow for the discovery of wastes that were once hidden and will lead to the development of tools for improving the data and information needed to support manufacturing in a Smart Manufacturing environment.