Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum on the discipline Taiichi Ohno worked out at Toyota across three decades and named the Toyota Production System: that everything between the customer's order and the receipt of cash that does not add value is waste, that there are seven kinds of it, and that Just-in-Time is not a goal but a discipline for revealing the waste.
It pairs with BUS 1700 (the Demingian Quality Simulacrum on quality made upstream) — Ohno credited Deming's work as foundational to the system — and with BUS 1800 (the Goldrattian Constraints Simulacrum on the theory of constraints), which attacks the same underlying question of system flow from a complementary angle.
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Led by Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around a process you know well — a production line, a software pipeline, a service workflow, a meeting cadence. The first sub-unit gives you the seven wastes Ohno identified at Toyota — overproduction, waiting, transport, over-processing, inventory, motion, defects — and asks you to find at least three of them in your own work. The second walks the most misread idea in the system, Just-in-Time, separating the discipline from the parodied goal of zero inventory. The third has you find one specific waste in your own process and name what would have to change upstream to eliminate it rather than buffer against it.
Outcome
You leave with the seven wastes named, at least three found in your own work, and one specific waste traced to its upstream cause with a concrete change that would eliminate it rather than buffer against it.
Sub-units