Transport is the movement of materials from one location to another, this is a waste as it

adds zero value to the product. Why would your customer (or you for that matter) want
to pay for an operation that adds no value?
Transport adds no value to the product, you as a business are paying people to move
material from one location to another, a process that only costs you money and makes
nothing for you. The waste of Transport can be a very high cost to your business, you
need people to operate it and equipment such as trucks or fork trucks to undertake this
expensive movement of materials.

The Waste of Inventory

Inventory Hides Problems

Inventory costs you money, every piece of product tied up in raw material, work in
progress or finished goods has a cost and until it is actually sold that cost is yours. In
addition to the pure cost of your inventory it adds many other costs; inventory feeds
many other wastes.
Inventory has to be stored, it needs space, it needs packaging and it has to be
transported around. It has the chance of being damaged during transport and becoming
obsolete. The waste of Inventory hides many of the other wastes in your systems.

The Waste of Motion

Excessive motion of either people or a machine is a waste.

Unnecessary motions are those movements of man or machine which are not as small
or as easy to achieve as possible, by this I mean bending down to retrieve heavy objects
at floor level when they could be fed at waist level to reduce stress and time to retrieve.
Excessive travel between work stations, excessive machine movements from start point
to work start point are all examples of the waste of Motion.
All of these wasteful motions cost you time (money) and cause stress on your
employees and machines, after all even robots wear out.

The Waste of Waiting

Eliminate the waste of waiting to make your processes smoother

How often do you spend time waiting for an answer from another department in your
organization, or waiting for a delivery from a supplier or an engineer to come and fix a
machine? We tend to spend an enormous amount of time waiting for things in our
working lives (and personal lives too), this is an obvious waste.
The Waste of Waiting disrupts flow, one of the main principles of Lean Manufacturing,
as such it is one of the more serious of the seven wastes or 7 mudas of lean
manufacturing.

The waste of Overproduction

Over producing what the customer does not want now is a waste

The most serious of all of the seven wastes; the waste of overproduction is making too
much or too early. This is usually because of working with oversize batches, long lead
times, poor supplier relations and a host of other reasons. Overproduction leads to high
levels of inventory which mask many of the problems within your organization.
The aim should be to make only what is required when it is required by the customer,
the philosophy of Just in Time (JIT), however many companies work on the principle of
Just in Case!

The Waste of Over-processing

Doing More than the customer wants costs you money

The waste of Overprocessing is where we use inappropriate techniques, oversize

equipment, working to tolerances that are too tight, perform processes that are not
required by the customer and so forth. All of these things cost us time and money.
One of the biggest examples of over-processing in most companies is that of the mega
machine that can do an operation faster than any other, but every process flow has to
be routed through it causing scheduling complications, delays and so forth. In lean;
small is beautiful, use small appropriate machines where they are needed in the flow,
not break the flow to route through a highly expensive monstrosity that the accountants
insist is kept busy!

The Waste of Defects

Defects hide many other problems and wastes

The most obvious of the seven wastes, although not always the easiest to detect before
they reach your customers. Quality errors that cause defects invariably cost you far
more than you expect. Every defective item requires rework or replacement, it wastes
resources and materials, it creates paperwork, it can lead to lost customers.
The Waste of Defects should be prevented where possible, better to prevent than to try
to detect them, implementation of pokayoke systems and autonomation can help to
prevent defects from occurring.

The above is plot of time vs percentage defective. The quality planning

activity starts much before the production operations begin.
During quality planning the needs of the customers are identified; the
product and the processes that will facilitate making there are developed to
meet the needs of the customer.
Then the operation starts a time t= 0. The operating personnel operate the
processes and the produce the products. They will find a number of
deficiencies in the product thus made; which make the percentage defects
higher. It could be as high as 20 percent. The deficiencies might have
occurred due to errors in 49 planning process. Juran call this region of high
defects as the chronic waste
region. During this phase, a large number of defects are found and corrected
through quality control. The process operators apply control to prevent these
things from getting worse. Sometimes, the defects could be very high, 40
percent as indicated in fig 8.1 this is called Sporadic Spike.
If quality control is not strictly followed, such spike could occur frequently
causing inconvenience to the customer and the organization
. This the original zone of quality control, as indicated in the figure, in
the due course of time, due to quality improvement initiatives, a new zone of
quality control is reached
. This gain was achieved through the third process namely quality
improvement. Now the percent defectives may reach five percent. This

achievement is due to quality improvement action initiated by the

organization. Once the performance stabilizes at the new zone of quality
control, the quality plan has to be updated.

Muri is all the unreasonable work that management imposes on workers and
machines because of poor organization, such as carrying heavy weights, moving
things around, dangerous tasks, even working significantly faster than usual. It is
pushing a person or a machine beyond its natural limits. This may simply be
asking a greater level of performance from a process than it can handle without
taking shortcuts and informally modifying decision criteria. Muri also includes bad
working conditions, and it will often push a resource to work harder than its
natural limits. Unreasonable work is almost always a cause of multiple variations.
Mura is the variation and inconsistency in quality and volume in both products
and human conditions.

Muda is the Japanese word for waste. It specifies it specifies any human activity,
which absorbs resources, but does not directly add customer value. These nonvalue-adding activities and results overproduction, waiting, transportation,
inventory, motion, over-processing, defective units are to be eliminated.

Defects

Products, services, or information that are wrong, incomplete, or late

Overproduction

Making too much, or too soon

Office examples: Data entry errors. Missing information. Other types of order entry or
errors. Any error that gets passed downstream only to be returned for correction o
clarification. Engineering change orders. Design flaws. Employee turnover. Absentee

Goal = Deliver exactly what the customer wants exactly when wanted.

Office examples: Printing extra copies. Printing paperwork (that might change) before
needed. Processing an order (that might change) before it is needed. Storing extra co
redundant filing systems. Emails to people that don't need to be cc'd.

Waiting

Waiting for anything... tools, equipment, materials, people...

Non Value Add

Processing

Any process steps that do not add value from the perspective of the custom

Transportation
and Handling

Any unnecessary movement of the thing being processed

Inventories

Piles of anything. Parts, supplies, emails, paperwork, archives...

Motion

Any unnecessary movement of human workers

Eschewed Human
Potential

Employing only people's backs, and not their minds.

To eschew means
"to purposely avoid"

Office examples: Slow computer speed. Downtime (computer, fax, phone...). Waiting
approvals. Waiting for information from customer. Waiting for clarification or correction
work received from an upstream process.

Relying on inspections, rather than designing the process to eliminate errors. Extra
information. Re-entering data into multiple information systems. Making extra copies.
Generating unused reports. Expediting. Unnecessarily cumbersome processes (think
financial statement period end close, expense reporting, the budget process...)

Office examples: Movement of paperwork. Multiple handoffs of electronic data. Appro

Excessive email attachments. Distributing unnecessary cc copies to people who don'
need to know.

Purchasing or making things before they are needed (think office supplies, literature..
Things waiting in an (electronic or physical) In Box. Unread email. Any form of batch
processing (maybe transactions, reports...)

Walking to copier, printer, fax... Walking between offices. Central filing. Searching for
information. Shifting back & forth between computer screens. Scrolling up and down
computer screens. Shuffling through papers.

Restricting employee's authority and responsibility to make routine decisions. Having

paid staff do routine tasks that don't require their unique expertise. Not providing the
business tools needed to perform and continuously improve each employee's assigne
Not trusting your people to stop production to stop and fix a problem (jidoka). Not trus
your people to be responsible for the cleanliness, maintenance, and organization of th
work area. Not trusting people with a flat organization structure of largely self-directed
Not expecting (and measuring) every person to contribute to continuous improvemen

Unsafe or unergonomic work conditions.

Anything that has potential to harm anyone. Office work conditions that cause carpel
eye fatigue, chronic back pain... Conditions that compromise the health and productiv
workers in any way.

Confusion. Anything that causes uncertainty about the right thing to do.

Confusing goals. Confusing metrics. Confusing instructions. Missing pieces. Lack of t

coaching, support. Missing or confusing systems.