Lean Managemetn Flashcards
What are the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Lean Manufacturing identifies seven primary categories of waste, often remembered by the acronym TIMWOOD. These are activities within a process that consume resources but do not add value from the customer’s perspective. Eliminating these wastes leads to improved efficiency, reduced costs, and better quality.
Here are the 7 wastes:
Transportation
Inventory:
Motion:
Waiting
Overproduction
Overprocessing
Defects
The 8th Waste:
It’s worth noting that many Lean practitioners now include an eighth waste:
Skills (or Non-Utilized Talent)
The core principle of Lean is to identify these wastes in any process and systematically work towards their elimination or reduction.
What about Transportation in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Transportation: This refers to the unnecessary movement of products, materials, or information between processes or locations. Every time something is moved, it adds risk of damage, delay, or loss, without adding value to the final product.
Example: Moving work-in-progress (WIP) long distances between workstations.
What about Inventory in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Inventory: This includes excess raw materials, WIP, or finished goods. Excess inventory ties up capital, requires storage space, can become obsolete or damaged, hides production problems, and increases lead times.
Example: Maintaining large stockpiles of raw materials “just in case”.
What about Motion in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Motion: This waste relates to the unnecessary movement of people or equipment within a process. Poor workstation layout, searching for tools, bending, reaching, or walking excessively are all forms of motion waste.
Example: A worker having to walk across the workshop frequently to retrieve necessary tools or parts.
What about Waiting in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Waiting: This involves idle time incurred when people, materials, information, or equipment are not ready or available to proceed with the next step in the process. This could be due to bottlenecks, unsynchronized operations, or equipment downtime.
Example: Operators waiting for a machine to finish its cycle, or waiting for materials to arrive from a previous step.
What about Overproduction in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Overproduction: Producing more, earlier, or faster than is required by the next process or the customer. This is often considered the most significant waste because it leads to other wastes, such as excess inventory, storage costs, and potential obsolescence.
Example: Producing a large batch of a product based on a forecast rather than actual customer orders.
What about Overprocessing in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Overprocessing: Performing more work or adding more features to a product or service than is necessary or valued by the customer. This can include using overly complex processes, unnecessarily high precision, redundant approvals, or excessive reporting.
Example: Polishing a surface that will not be visible or doesn’t require it for functionality, or requiring multiple sign-offs for a minor change.
What about Defects in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Defects: Producing products or services that do not meet specifications, requiring rework, scrap, repair, or returns. This consumes resources, disrupts flow, and can lead to customer dissatisfaction.
Example: Parts that fail quality inspection and need to be fixed or discarded.
What about the 8th waste in the 7 wastes of Lean Management?
Skills (or Non-Utilized Talent): Failing to leverage the knowledge, skills, creativity, and experience of the workforce. This includes not involving employees in process improvement, assigning them to tasks below their capability, or poor communication. An acronym often used to include this is DOWNTIME (Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized Talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra-processing).
The core principle of Lean is to identify these wastes in any process and systematically work towards their elimination or reduction.
