Every process in business either adds value or creates waste when goods or services are being produced. Show
The main idea of “lean production” is about highlighting the things that add value by reducing everything else (waste). As a proven consequence, when you eliminate waste, the quality of products improves, while production time and costs are reduced. In lean production or, more specifically, the Toyota Production System (TPS), there’s a whole body of knowledge and research on how to reduce waste in business. TPS offers many different tools for waste reduction, such as Value Stream Mapping, Kanban, and the 5S system. The Japanese word for waste is muda (wastefulness, uselessness), which relates to muri (overload) and mura (imbalance). All three are the foundation on which the TPS philosophy is built. Interestingly, in TPS waste is comprehensively categorized into the “7 wastes of lean”, with very concrete recommendations as to how to reduce it. And that’s what you’ll learn in this article. What is considered as waste in lean production?We all intuitively know that waste is undesirable, both in business and our personal lives. In general we can define waste as something unwanted, poor, or bad; something that doesn’t bring anything positive, usually appearing after a specific process has been completed. In business, a more formal definition would be that waste is all those activities that don’t create any value for the market. In other words, valuable are all those activities that directly or indirectly lead to an outcome which a customer would be willing to pay for (creating higher added value). Everything else is considered as waste. It’s important to understand that every organization must also perform activities that do not directly lead to value for customers, but do create value indirectly. That’s why TPS defines two types of Muda:
Reducing or removing Type-1 Muda should only happen after careful analysis and consideration, in order to make sure the reduction won’t impact the quality of the products or overall success of the company. Nevertheless, the core task of all managers is to optimize efficiency in all value-adding activities and minimize the non-value-adding activities. With that in mind, research behind “lean production” has shown that even if the products being produced in factories are totally different, the types of waste across industries are very similar. And that brings us to the 7 wastes of lean. What are the “7 wastes of lean”?Before we go into the 7 wastes of lean, let’s revise the importance of understanding waste vs. value.
In business, customers vote how much they value products and services with their money. Building the right things is a prerequisite for business success. That’s not part of lean production deals with, but rather the lean startup concept. Next to that, when you know what to offer to the market (doing the right things), you want to be as efficient as possible in doing that (doing things right). Efficiency is about achieving peak performance, where we use the least amount of inputs to achieve the highest output. To minimize inputs, all waste must be eliminated. In terms of production efficiency, there are seven types of waste:
You can use the acronym ‘TIMWOOD’ to remember the 7 Wastes of Lean easier. Using a good time & attendance system and project time tracker and similar technologies supporting business processes can greatly help to reduce different types of waste listed above, especially those that are connected to time waste.
And now let’s look systematically at each one, as well as some ideas on how to eliminate waste and achieve the maximum possible efficiency in the process of production. 1. Transportation – Don’t unnecessarily move products or materials Unnecessary transportation is an obvious waste which is easy to notice. Transportation is defined for this purpose as the movement of products or materials from one location to other, the obvious thing being that transportation adds no value to the product. In lean production, what we consider a transportation waste is when we are moving products that don't need to undergo any processing. In addition to producing waste, every time a product is transported, it is at risk of being damaged, lost or delayed. The longer the product moves around, the longer it goes without any value being added to it. Handling of the products is also part of transportation waste.Transportation waste is most often caused by:Having several production or storage locationsPoorly laid out production lines Overly-complex production processesLarge batch sizesThe solution: you have to minimize all transportation in the production process and avoid any unnecessary steps between any two processes. There must be a good flow between the processes, and strict limitation of work in progress.New ideas & best tips How to create a |