The eight deadly lean wastes: DOWNTIME

Copious amounts of waste can occur in the workplace, particularly in the manufacturing process. Do you know what the eight most common wastes are and how they impact your organization?

Taiichi Ohno, considered the father of the Toyota Production System (TPS), created a lean manufacturing framework based on the idea of preserving or increasing value with less work.

Anything that does not increase value in the eye of the customer must be considered waste, and every effort should be made to eliminate that waste. The following eight lean manufacturing wastes, mostly derived from the TPS, apply universally to businesses today. The acronym for the eight wastes is DOWNTIME, which stands for:

• Defects
• Overproduction
• Waiting
• Not utilizing talent
• Transportation
• Inventory excess
• Motion waste
• Excess processing

Defects

Defects are mistakes that require additional time, resources and money to fix. In a manufacturing process, a defect might involve a defective part that has to be remade. Some causes include:

• Poor quality controls
• Poor repair
• Poor documentation
• Lack of standards
• Weak or missing processes
• Misunderstanding customer needs
• Uncontrolled inventory levels
• Poor design and undocumented design changes

Completely eradicating any form of waste is impossible, but defects can certainly be limited by a few measures. These include the application of standardized work plans, more stringent quality control at all levels, a full understanding of work requirements and customer needs, and simple job aids such as checklists.

In some organizations, workers just blindly keep producing, even when those who receive their output either are not ready for it or do not need it. This is a big flaw as it can tie up significant working capital. It is especially common in manufacturing, but it can occur in any workplace situation where there is a bottleneck. 

• Just-in-case production
• Unclear customer needs
• Producing to a forecast
• Long setup times
• Engineering changes
• Poorly-applied automation

The solution to overproduction is to establish a reasonable workflow for the benefit of the customer. Ensure there are well-established procedures in place for every process in your organization, and if necessary, implement new processes to keep work from backing up behind particular bottlenecks in the organization.

While it is not part of TPS' seven wastes, failing to utilize talent is on the rise in businesses today. Not using or under-using people's talents, skills and knowledge can have a detrimental effect on an organization.

Companies can reap great benefits when they recognize the value of skills and improvement ideas from all levels of the business, and can suffer when they are not effectively engaging in the process. This can typically be seen with:

• Assigning staff to wrong tasks
• Wasteful admin tasks
• Poor communication
• Lack of teamwork
• Poor management
• Insufficient training

If the above list sounds oddly familiar, it is normal. Many of these failings are the same ones that result in a lack of employee engagement, which can hamstring any organization's productivity. Key solutions include empowering your employees, stopping micromanagement and increasing training.

Transportation is waste caused by moving things around. This is less of a problem in a business office than in a manufacturing plant, since most of what white collar workers "transport" can be sent by email for example.

Otherwise, too much transportation tends to increase costs, waste time, raise the likelihood of product damage and deterioration and can result in poor communication. In general, transportation waste can be caused by:

• Poor plant or office layout
• Unnecessary or excessive steps in the process
• Misaligned process flow
• Poorly-designed systems

Limiting transportation waste can be easily addressed by common-sense efforts such as simplifying processes, repairing physical layouts, handling products less often and making distances between steps as short as possible.

Systematic elimination of these wastes can result in faster processes, lower costs, higher quality, happier workers and, most importantly, happier customers.