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See the Waste Get It Gone. Keep It Gone. By John Compton, Professor Emeritus, Rochester Institute of Technology


Print production oper- ations are plagued by many different wastes. Reruns and downtime are perhaps the most commonly identified wastes in companies looking to improve effi- ciencies. In reality, waste is all around us, in our plants, in our homes, and


The Magazine 2 3.2017


everywhere in between. Have you ever had to wait at a doctor’s office? Throw away food from your pantry that was kept past its expiration date? Move some- thing in your garage to get to something else? All are examples of waste in our everyday lives.


At work, waste is defined as any activity that does not add value to the product or service being delivered from the perspective of the customer. In other words, the customer must be willing to pay for the activity. The identification and elimination of waste is a basic principle of Lean manufacturing.


Within every process there are two types of activities: those that add value and those that do not. Both consume time and money, but only the value- added activities bring in money. Those that add no value are waste and must be eliminated. Lean think- ing helps us understand that every activity should be considered waste unless it meets an explicit cus- tomer requirement and cannot be performed more economically. In several studies of print production operations by this author, the amount of lead time (time between order entry and product delivery) consumed by value adding activities averaged 9%. In other words, 91% of the time was consumed by non- value adding activities. This is all waste!


There are seven commonly identified types of waste in Lean manufacturing. The acronym TIM WOOD can be used to help remember them: Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over- processing, and Defects.


Transportation This waste occurs any time goods and materials are moved. Although the physical structure of the plant may require some form of transportation, simply moving things around the shop or office adds no real value to the product. The use of forklifts, hand trucks, and carts are common examples. Also, conveyor tracks are simply elaborate and space-consuming transportation waste creators. Customers do not see transportation activities as adding value to the prod- uct. It adds cost and time, not value.


Inventory Inventory waste occurs when the supply of raw mate- rials, work-in-process (WIP), and/or finished goods exceeds the immediate demand of the next opera- tion downstream. It is often the result of over- production. Inventory costs you money. Every piece of product tied up in raw material, WIP, or finished goods has a cost and until it is actually sold, that cost is unrecovered. Additionally, inventory adds many other costs since it must be moved, stored, tracked, and protected from damage. Finally, inventory hides many other wastes in the system, such as scheduling shortcomings, reruns, equipment capability, and long makereadies, among others.


Motion The waste of motion deals with the unnecessary motions of people—those movements of people or machines which are not as small or as easy to per- form as possible. Examples include bending down to


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