The 7Ws - Taiichi Ohno's Categories of Waste

Taichi Ohno is a production engineer whose

formative years were spent in the textiles
division of the Toyota Corporation, and who
moved to the automotive business in 1943.
Ohno is usually referred to as the Father of
the Toyota Production System (TPS), which is
itself the basis for what is considered in the
West as Lean manufacturing.
In fact, the TPS was first launched in the West as
Just in Time, or JIT, when the initial visits from
the US and Europe to see how Japanese industry
had stolen such a march resulted in people
returning with stories of factories which made
only what was required, when required. No
wonder these people were capturing all our
markets when they carried no stock and didn't
need complex computer systems to plan
production. All they had was little yellow cards
which sat on the side of tins, stillages or baskets
and instructed Machine Shops to provide
components for their colleagues (or customers) in
Assembly.
Later, of course, we realised that there was more
to it than this - these little yellow cards (or
kanbans) only worked because of all the thought
and effort that had been expended in creating a
factory that challenged the basic concepts of
manufacturing. We realised that JIT was about
more than stock and batch quantities and when
John Krafcik, a researcher in the late-1980s MIT
study into automobile manufacturing, coined the
term Lean , it seemed appropriate. Lean, in basic
terms, means the elimination of waste (or Muda,
in Toyota-speak). Ohno identified seven wastes to
be addressed by the Toyota system, and they have
become known as the 7Ws.
So what are the 7Ws?

Defects

The simplest form of wate is components or products

that do not meet the specification. We all know about
the Japanese scaring us with their target of single-
figure reject rates when we realised that they
measured in parts per million and that 1% defects gave
 a figure of 10,000. Of course, the key point of Japanese
quality achievement came with the switch from Quality
Control to Quality Assurance - efforts devoted to
getting the process right, rather than inspecting the
results.

Over-Production

A key element of JIT was making only the quantity

required of any component or product. This challenged
the Western premise of the Economic Order Quantity
(EOQ) which was built on acceptance of fixed ordering
costs, built around set-up times, and thus the need to
spread these fixed costs over large batches. Another
Japanese guru who contributed to this change is Shigeo
Shingo who led Toyota's move from long set-ups to
Single Minute Exchange of Die (or SMED).

Waiting

Time not being used effectively is a waste - we are

incurring the cost of wages and all the fixed costs of
rent, rates, lighting and heating so we should use every
minute of every day productively. Ohno looked at the
reasons for machines or operators being under-utilised
and set about addressing them all. Thus we have learnt
about preventive maintenance and the creation of flow
through our factories with the emphasis on takt time,
the rate at which a component or product moves to the
next stage.

Transporting

Items being moved incur a cost, if it is only the energy

needed to initiate the movement - such as the
electricity absorbed by a fork lift truck. Of course,
movement brings another cost, which is less visible but
more significant. Managing a factory with operations
spread apart is much more difficult than when the
subsequent stages are adjacent to one another. This
can be seen as the primary driver behind cellular
manufacturing (though some would point out that
 Group Technology is very similar and came from
Sweden, rather than from the Orient).

Movement

On a related note, people spending time moving around

the plant is equally wasteful. The time a machine
operator or fitter wastes walking to the toolroom or the
stores for a fixture or a component could be far better
utilised if our plant layout and housekeeping were
geared around having everything that is required close
to hand.

Inappropriate Processing

The most obvious example of inappropriate processing

from my own experience relates to surface finishes that
required components to be moved to grinders for
completion, when in fact such finishes served no
purpose. A basic principle of the TPS is doing only what
is appropriate.

Inventory

The element that Western industry immediately

focused upon when confronted with JIT was the cost
reduction available from holding less inventory. The
fact that the initial fact-finding trips to Japan took place
when interest rates were at breathtakingly high levels
(my own mortgage was at 15%) perhaps contributed to
our failing to see the other costs that Ohno had
considered in his own interpretation. We now know
that stock hides problems and that problems are pearls
in that finding a problem is a good thing - now we can
solve it, which we couldn't until it came to light

Improving quality through waste

elimination
Total Quality-you've heard the term. You've seen the
acronym. But, what does it mean within the framework of
lean manufacturing systems?
Most quality efforts focus on two things: quality control-
based on standards and inspection, and quality prevention-
based on techniques such as error proofing. Most people do
not realize the effect that the overall manufacturing system
has on quality. Waste elimination in the manufacturing
environment, usually thought of in terms of cost reduction,
can have a dramatic positive impact on improving quality.
Systematic waste elimination is a cornerstone of lean
systems thinking. Unfortunately, waste elimination is
typically viewed as an opportunity to improve efficiency
versus the equally important measure of effectiveness. A
relentless focus on eliminating waste will have a profound
effect on the quality of the service or product you provide.
Just examine the seven types of waste and their impact on
quality:
* Inventory - Excess inventory, either in finished goods or
work-in-process, delays the detection of defects and, in fact,
fosters the storage of undetected defects. Often the quality
problem is not found until the product reaches the
customer. Then you have to go back through your inventory
to detect where the defect originated, weeks or even
months after the defect first occurred.
* Over-processing - Following tighter specifications, or
simply providing more than a customer wants in order to
satisfy form, fit, and function requirements, ultimately adds
more complexity and more variation to a process, both of
which lead to more chances for error.
* Over-production - Providing a product or service before or
in a greater quantity than the customer requires prevents
early detection of a defect, and subsequently embeds the
defect in every product until it's detected.
* Motion - There is a simple rule of thumb that applies here.
"You can't make as many mistakes in 10 handoffs as you can
in 100 handoffs." During every handoff, in every move, there
is another chance for a mistake to occur.
* Transportation - See Motion.
* Waiting - The longer it takes to detect a defect, the more
likely it is that it will be repeated. Problem identification
needs to be as close to the point of activity as possible. Not
finding out about a defect until a customer files a warranty
claim is a long time to wait before you know there's a
problem.
* Defects - Even quality has its own waste category.
And just what is the cost of carrying out systematic waste
elimination in order to improve quality? Nothing. It's free
when properly planned and implemented. Additionally, the
cost of poor quality is frequently underestimated. Often the
cost is hidden in overhead or absorbed in indirect costs, and
the true cost of its impact becomes impossible to recognize.
Now don't get me wrong, an investment is necessary. It will
be an investment of dollars and human resources. The
difference is: Cost is an expenditure of resources whose
benefits decrease over time. With Investment, the situation
is easily reversed.
So investment is necessary to develop a common lens and
language for waste, so the entire organization-and I mean
everyone-can identify opportunities to eliminate waste
every day. Seldom does the initial investment have any
negative short-term financial impact, and in the long term
there is a substantial increase in benefits that continually
multiplies over time.
My words of advice are these: Don't start a quality program.
Start a quality culture. Develop a shared set of mental
models that focus on waste elimination to improve quality.
Figuring out what you want to do to improve quality is easy.
It's harder to figure out how to do it. But the rewards are
well worth the effort: improved quality, lower cost,
competitive advantages, exceptional ROI, and much more.
To improve quality, develop a shared set of mental models
that focus on waste elimination.