Where Are The 8 Hidden Wastes?

Why most of all manufacturing units facing trouble to survive against competitors? How do competitors serve best at lowest cost to the customer or market? The 8 Hidden Wastes Created & Presented by: Himanshu Tiwari Plant Continuous Improvement

What is waste?

Waste is defined as anything that you do that doesn’t add value to the product. Activities like changeovers, looking for tools, moving items from place to place are just some of the things that we do on a day by day basis that simply cost time and effort for no real return.

Generally these wastes fall into 8 main categories:

Transportation

Transportation occurs in many places across the business, whether it is moving equipment, raw materials or finished goods by fork lift truck, conveyor or some other means. All of this effort consumes valuable resources that adds no real value to the finished product.

Inventory

There are 3 main types of inventory, raw material that has been delivered and is waiting to be processed, work in process and finished goods. All of this inventory comes at a huge cost, whether we purchase in the materials well before the customer pays for it or the cost of resources needed for storing it on site, consider the amount of energy required to keep the product in good condition in our cold stores. Excess inventory can also hide issues that we have in our facilities, stopping us getting to the route because of safety, quality and productivity problems. All of this adds no real value to the product and in today’s modern world the customer is increasingly unlikely to want to pay for this non added value cost.

Motion

In many cases excess motion when you look at it is clear to see but we often take it for granted, if we look at this example of a spaghetti diagram of a change over we can see this individual walking all over the area looking for tools just to get the job done. We need to get everything where you need it when you need it so that movement is reduced to a minimum. We should also look to design our work areas so that all excess movement like twisting,

Waiting

Waiting really occurs on two levels, it can be a product having to wait in the process for some reason or it can be people having to wait because of a changeover or break down, slow computer systems, waiting for materials and many, many other reasons. We need to look at why these delays or stoppages occur and improve or fix them to allow the process to flow more consistently.

Overproduction

Over production is where we make additional products for no reason, it may be to use up the last remaining raw material or it may be running a line an extra hour at the end of the shift, all this does is build inventory into the cold stores and add to the finished goods stock. If we produce more than the customer actually ordered then there is the potential that if we do not receive an order for that product it will end up being

Over Processing

Over processing is when we put more into the product than the customer is really willing to pay for, an example is over using energy or water, whether it is cooling or heating the product beyond the specification required to make a

Defects

Defects are by far the most expensive form of waste. To dispose or re-work a product costs time and money and usually means some level of disruption in the process. Often people have to be taken off their normal jobs to sort the problem out or the process has to be stopped to correct it. Defects can occur anywhere in the process from start to finish, it could be a problem like defective packaging material from the supplier, a

Under Utilisation

The final waste is under utilisation of people’s skills and knowledge and often the experts are the people who run the process day to day. By tackling the other 7 wastes and driving them out, we can free up time and resources to allow people to focus on improvement activities on a daily basis, we call it “Little Ops Every Day”, getting everyone involved in changing the way we do business to make Organization a better place to work.

Conclusion

So there you have it the 8 wastes of manufacturing, there is a handy way of remembering them, we rearrange the words, think of your skills and knowledge rather than under utilisation and then we look at the first letters, we get the name Tim Woody, this is Tim, so when you see waste think of Tim