Is Your Operational Waste on the Rise?


By James A. Workman, Vice President, Center for Technology and Research, Printing Industries of America


As we begin 2017, the economy is in its eighth year of growth and printing companies are, on average, enjoy- ing the highest level of profitability since the Great Recession. Growth, however, may have been accommodated with deci- sions counter-productive


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WINTER 2017


to reducing waste and improving performance. Floor space may have been haphazardly filled with inventory or additional equipment. Clutter and disorganization may have become the norm. Safety priorities may have been overlooked in order to stay on schedule.


Now would be a good time to reassess operational performance. Printers that pursue operational excellence do so in part by putting in place disci- plined processes for employees to search for and remove non-value-added activities (things customers wouldn’t want to pay for). That helps bring manufac- turing costs down, develops an energizing culture, and reduces lead time.


Here are eight types of waste companies can use to assess the efficiency of their operations. All employ- ees should be sensitized to these so they can be spotted and dealt with. If a company is ignorant of its current situation, things are unlikely to improve.


Defects This refers to more than the product itself, but the time and materials wasted in producing defective product then re-running it. Waste from product defects includes employee time spent, materials and


equipment used inspecting and sorting defective product, and in identifying, handling, and segregating non-conforming product.


Overproduction Overproduction is producing product earlier or in an amount greater than the next process or customer needs. The result is large amounts of product spend- ing long periods of time in work-in-process (WIP). Symptoms of overproduction include pulling jobs off equipment in the middle of a production run to make room for another job, production overtime that customers don’t pay for, large amounts of floor space clogged with skids of WIP, process bottlenecks and bindery extras that are never used, and warehouses filled with finished inventory.


Waiting Processes and people waiting for other processes and people to complete activities, scheduled downtime, equipment breakdowns, defective product, and inaccurate and incomplete job information are all non-value-added waste.


Transportation Think about the time spent and extra equipment used to valet information, tooling, materials, sup- plies, and WIP around the plant. Moving product on pallets from one side of the building to another and back again is a perfect example.


Inventory and WIP Inventory should be whittled down to the bare min- imum. There is a dollar cost in time and resources to hold excessive raw materials, lots of WIP, and a warehouse full of finished goods. This is why “just in time” is a mantra at many Lean-thinking companies.


OPERATIONS


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