"SEVEN FORMS OF WASTE" CONCEPT

 

The idea of eliminating waste originates from the Toyota Production System. Taiichi Ohno, who is considered as one of the founding fathers of lean manufacturing, dedicated his career to establishing a solid and efficient work process.

During his journey, Ohno described three major roadblocks that can influence a company’s work processes negatively: Muda (wasteful activities), Muri (overburden) and Mura (unevenness).

In Lean, waste is any activity that consumes resources but brings no value to the end customer. Based on his observations and deep analysis, he categorized the 7 types of waste (7 Mudas), which later became a popular practice for cost reduction and optimizing resources.

1. Transportation

This type of waste is when you move resources (materials) and the movement doesn’t add value to the product. Excessive movement of materials can be costly to your business and cause damage to quality. Often, transportation may force you to pay additionally for time, space, and machinery.

2. Inventory

Excessive inventory is often the result of a company holding “just in case” inventories. In such cases, companies overstock themselves in order to meet unexpected demand, protect from production delays, low quality or other problems. However, these excessive inventories often don’t meet customer’s needs and don’t add value. They only increase storage and depreciation costs

3. Motion

This kind of waste includes movements of employees (or machinery) which are complicated and unnecessary. They can cause injuries, extended production time and more. In other words, do whatever is necessary to arrange a process where workers need to do as little as possible to finish their job.

4. Waiting

This is probably the easiest waste you can recognize. Whenever goods or tasks are not moving, the waste of waiting occurs. It is easily identifiable because lost time is the most obvious thing you can detect. For example, goods waiting to be delivered,  equipment waiting to be fixed, or a document waiting for approval from executives.

5. Overproduction

Having in mind that waste is anything that the customer is not willing to pay for, it is easy to realize why overproduction is Muda. Producing more means that you exceed customer’s demand, which leads to additional costs. Actually, overproduction triggers the other 6 wastes to appear. The reason is that excess products or tasks require additional transportation, excessive motion, greater waiting time and so on. Furthermore, if occasionally a defect appears during overproduction, it means your team will need to rework more units.

6. Over-processing

This type of waste usually reflects on doing work that doesn’t bring additional value or it brings more value than required. Such things can be adding extra features to a given product that nobody is going to use, but they increase your business costs. For example, if a car manufacturer decides to put a TV screen in the back trunk of a vehicle, probably nobody will use it or find value in it. Even more, it will cost resources and it will increase the end price of the product for something that customers are not willing to pay for.

7. Defects

Defects can cause rework or even worse, they can lead to scrap. Usually, defected work should go back to production again, which costs valuable time. Moreover, in some cases, an extra reworking area is required which comes with additional exploitation of labor and tools.