What Is WASTE ?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives several definitions of WASTE. One of them is: "damaged, defective, or superfluous material produced by a manufacturing process." In LEAN, WASTE has a much deeper and wider meaning. Lean Practitioners consider several things as waste.

In a typical factory, many activities are done, materials converted and several manual and machine dependent operations take place. Lean Practitioners consider anything that does not add value as Waste. (More on Value Addition in a later post). Here is a convenient way to remember the eight forms of waste we encounter in most organizations. Just remember the acronym DOWNTIME. I will now expand it for you.

D: Defects

O: Overproduction

W: Waiting

N: Non Utilization of Resources

T: Transportation

I: Inventory

M: Motion

E: Extra Processing

Defects: Products or services that are not acceptable to customers.

Overproduction: Making products faster, sooner or in greater number than needed.

Waiting: Waiting for products to be worked on or for information to be processed.

Non-Utilization Resources: Not using everyone’s talent to solve challenges – or even worse, not consulting them at all.

Transportation: When products are moved from one point to another without adding any value.

Inventory: It covers materials, information, work in process and finished goods that are not stocked and supplied in the most efficient way possible.

Motion: Wasted motion or requiring too much motion to add value.

Extra Processing: Doing more steps than required within a process, or more than what customers will pay for. Doing more processing than what is demanded by the customer.

A basic understanding of the above is very essential to action on each of the above parameters that are most common in every industry. Once understood, it is possible to protect ourselves by eliminating or minimizing the above.

In this article, we mentioned the term "value" many times. Next week, we will go deeper into what it means in the Lean context.

Here is the link for last week's article. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/five-steps-lean-sridhar-j

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