When referring to waste people immediately think of either material waste or garbage. But there exists another kind of waste. The kind that wastes our time. And those kind of wastes are the ones that we hunt as Lean practitioners. The so called 7+1 wastes.
But before we go into the wastes we need to discuss the term value add.
What that means is what really adds value to the customer. We look at all activities with the eyes of the customer. Simply asking this question: would the customer (or you yourself be willing to pay for the company performing that activity? If yes the activity adds value and if not, that activity is said to be non value adding.
There is another way to assess if the activity is value adding or not. Ask if the activity transforms the product or moves the product closer to the customer? If not it is non value adding.
But the story doesn’t end here.
We also have activities that doesn’t add value but that we can’t get rid off. Those are known as non value add but necessary, that would be for instance required quality controls, legislative requirements etc. These are necessary right now but that doesn’t mean we should accept them at all costs. They are non value add and if the requirements changes and the activity no longer is needed it should be eliminated.
7+1 wastes
According to the godfather of Toyota Production System (sometimes called Lean) Taichii Ohno there exists seven types of wastes. Those are:
Transportation: All activity where we are transporting goods, materials, documents etc. but not transforming it or getting the final product closer to the customer
Inventory: Where goods, materials, WIP is just lying around not moving closer to the customer, included obsolete items
Movement: When we are moving around to fix things, find things, searching for information. All movement that doesn’t add value to the product
Waiting: All waiting activities, waiting for colleagues, suppliers, leaders, subordinates and customers. This could be waiting for documents, materials, information, responses etc.
Overproduction: this is considered one of the worse wastes. When you produce too much, you need to transport it, put it into the stock, administer it and even count it. If we produced exactly what the customer had ordered it would probably not even be in the factory for long.
Over processing: this is all the activities where we do more than the customer requires. This could be measuring one more time just to be sure, this could be two employees controlling each others work, when we polish an item one more time just because .., when we wash the hopper one more time etc.
Defects: when we allow our processes to create bad quality or that is our employees to create bad quality. That means all activities that creates rework or scrapping defective parts
Those are the 7 (sometimes called deadly) wastes.
But we are missing one last one and that is the lack of using our employees creativity and innovation. It is a different kind of waste since it is not something we want to eliminate but instead increase. For that reason I always call it the +1 waste. So all in all there are 7+1 wastes.
How to spot waste
So now that we know what waste is..
How do we spot it?
Well one very known way of forcing people to look for waste is using the famous Ohno circle.
Story has it that the Taiichi Ohno would take his student to the Gemba (the place where value is created) and order him to stand in a certain place. Then he would pull out a piece of chalk and draw a circle around the person on the floor. Then he would order him to stand in that circle for as long as it would take him to write down for instance 20 improvement suggestions.
Let this story true or false… we shall grasp something useful from it.
But what was really the goal with this exercise?
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Hey Erik really good article, would like to add just one small thing.
We used the term ECRSA – Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify & Automate. Another method of remembering this is “RACES”