retrieve objects, stretching or straining to perform a task, excessive travel between work stations, etc. None of this adds value from the customer’s point of view. These are health and safety concerns as well.


Waiting Any time workers are standing around waiting for material, information, assistance, people, instruc- tions, etc., the waste of waiting is happening. Fur- thermore, whenever goods are not moving or being processed, the waste of waiting occurs.


Overproduction This waste occurs when something is produced either before it is needed by the next process downstream or in a quantity resulting in WIP or finished goods inventory. This is often the result of batch sizes that are too large. Overproduction leads to excess inven- tory, and since inventory creates many other wastes, overproduction is often seen as the most costly waste.


Overprocessing Overprocessing occurs when work is performed that the customer has not explicitly requested in the finished product—if a printed product is produced on a heavier stock than necessary to meet customer requirements, for example. This can be a challeng- ing waste to uncover since there is a common desire to satisfy or even delight the customer.


Defects Defects are what most people think of when you talk about waste. A defect is any work product that is less than acceptable to move the process downstream. Defects occur when a product has something wrong with it, such as incorrect color or physical defects like spots and tears. Defects cost much more than most people believe, since they lead to inspection, scrap, rework, reruns, and corrective actions.


The Eighth Waste: Brainpower (Skills) While the previous wastes are the traditional wastes, we also need to understand and eliminate an eighth waste—the waste of employee skills and brainpower. This involves recognizing that a company’s most important assets are its employees. Only making use of their physical capabilities without tapping into


their talent and brainpower leads to a great waste. Employees live inside the processes that contain the first seven wastes and are perfectly situated to work on continually improving. Not using their talents and skills means those wastes (and costs) will continue. The acronym becomes TIM WOODS when we add the S for skills and talent at the end.


Learning to See Waste hides in plain sight. That’s because we’ve lived so long in our existing systems without an under- standing of the embedded waste that we don’t even see it. We don’t know what to look for or how to look for it let-alone eliminate it. Once everyone in the company learns about these wastes, the obvious next step is to practice looking for them. Once you start looking for them, you will find them everywhere—at work, at home, and places in between.


A useful method for learning to see the waste is a practice created by Taiichi Ohno, a key developer of the Toyota Production System. The practice is called


“Stand in the Circle” and involves going into the plant, drawing a circle on the floor three feet in diameter, and asking an employee to stand in that circle for at least one hour. While there, the employee is asked to identify all of the waste he or she can see by observ- ing work processes from that location. At the end of the observation period, the employee reports what wastes have been identified with suggestions on what could be done to minimize it. Use the link below to download a form designed to facilitate the activity. The more you practice this, the better you’ll become at seeing the waste.


Waste is like gravity: it’s constantly weighing us down. We must learn how to see it and minimize it or suffer the consequences of unnecessarily high costs and long lead times.


STAND IN THE CIRCLE


Download a form to assist your staff in seeing waste, removing it from your operation, and keeping it gone.


http://prnt.in/standinthecircle The Magazine 3 3.2017


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