IQ and Muda: Information Quality Eliminates Waste

IQ and Muda: Information Quality Eliminates Waste by Larry English

The article provides an explanation of each of these 9 types of muda and relates them to information quality:

There are nine types of muda in information quality:

• Muda of overproduction
• Muda of inventory
• Muda of repair/rejects
• Muda of motion
• Muda of processing
• Muda of transport
• Muda of waiting
• Muda of process failure caused by defective information
• Muda of wrong or suboptimized decisions caused by defective information

The first seven types are described by Masaaki Imai in his book Gemba Kaizen. We will examine each type of muda, why it is muda and how it wastes the other resources of the enterprise.

The real problem with poor quality information is not the poor quality information itself. It is about the costs of the waste caused by poor quality and about customer alienation and lost customer lifetime value. The real business case for information is to be found in measuring the costs of poor quality information and improving processes to prevent the defective information and the muda and costs associated with it.

Does your information quality function address muda elimination for the muda caused by defective information processes and defective information? If not, should it?