8 Wastes of Lean
Lean aims to eliminate waste in every area of business process for both manufacturing & service organizations. This includes sales & marketing, operations, production, office administration. Its goal is to incorporate less human effort, less inventory, less time to develop products, and less space to become highly responsive to customer demand while producing top quality products in the most efficient and economical manner possible. Essentially, a “waste” is anything that the customer is not willing to pay for.
8 Types of Waste
Typically the 8 types of waste considered in a Lean manufacturing system include:
1. Transportation: does not add any value to the product. Instead of improving transportation, it should be minimized or eliminated (e.g. forming cells).
2. Inventory or Work in Process (WIP): is material between operations due to large lot production or processes with long cycle times.
3. Motion: of the workers, machines, and transport (e.g. due to the inappropriate location of tools and parts) is waste. Instead of automating wasted motion, the operation itself should be improved.
4. Waiting: for a machine to process should be eliminated. The principle is to maximise the utilisation/efficiency of the worker instead of maximising the utilisation of the machines.
5. Overproduction: to produce more than demanded or produce it before it is needed.It is visible as storage of material. It is the result of producing to speculative demand. Overproduction means making more than is required by the next process, making earlier than is required by the next process, or making faster than is required by the next process.
6. Over-Processing: Over-Processing waste: should be minimised by asking why a specific processing step is needed and why a specific product is produced. All unnecessary processing steps should be eliminated.
7. Defective products: is pure waste. Prevent the occurrence of defects instead of finding and repairing defects. Nearly every waste in the production process can fit into at least one of these categories. The focus is on making the entire process flow, not the improvement of one or more individual operations.
8. Unused Human Intellect: Under utilizing human resource capabilities, delegating tasks with inadequate training, employees are not involved in problem solving and finding solutions, no proper system to retain knowledge and skills of experienced employees.
The 8 types of waste will be interpreted and contextualized/customized specifically for your company during our in-house Lean Thinking training.
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