8 DEADLY WASTES @ MANUFACTURING

In our day to day professional or personal life we perform two types of activities, one is value-added and other one is  non value-added.

Value Added Activity: An activity that increases the value of a product at a given stage in a production cycle or supply chain. For example, a timber company cuts down trees, which adds value to the wood because it can then be used. It may then sell the timber to a miller, who adds value by refining the timber into planks of wood. A carpenter who buys the planks adds value by making them into a table, which can then be sold to a customer.

All activities the customer is paying for or  an activity that physically changes the shape or character of a product or assembly is called value added activity.

Surprisingly we usually spend less than 5% of our time actually doing something in our working day that actually adds any value for the customer which is value added activity, rest of the things can be consider as anon value added  some people call it “Cost to the company” in Lean Manufacturing it’s called as  “MUDA” .

The MUDA or WASTE can be classified in two 7 main categories

·     Transportation

·     Inventory

·     Motion

·     Waiting

·     Overproduction

·     Over processing

·     Defects

Let’s make it easy to remember  its “ TIMWOOD”

TIMWOOD

Or

WORMPIT 

Transportation :

The waste of transportation is the movement of product between processes, normally using a fork lift truck or a smaller "personal" piece of equipment to manoeuvre   product around the factory.

This transportation wastes both time and energy and has the potential to damage the products. Transportation is caused by large batches and overproduction as well as poor layout.

It is quite normal for factories to be laid out in a traditional style with all specific process types being located in different areas, like all moulding will be done in one area , machining in another and so on.This leads to the need to transport product over potentially long distances. 

In , one of my earlier company I worked for , is producing toys , where all plastic moulded parts were manufactured in different shops ( some of them are even being manufactured at third party vendors) , they all will be collected at a central shop called packing department where 20 people were segregating and packing toy- wise parts in a box and them send them to assembly section. 

Which was practically safer and as per tradition of the company but all these transportation is nothing but a “MUDA” or a Transportation Waste and for non of them customer was paying.

Inventory:

Inventory is all of that Work in Progress (WIP) and stock that is sitting around costing you money. One of the principles of Lean Manufacturing is that of  “Just in Time”, producing what the customer wants when they want it, failure to follow these principles results in overproduction and the creation of Inventory.

Inventory is created by the waste of Overproduction, this is the worst of all the seven wastes as this "sea" of inventory hides all of the problems under it. Because of all of this inventory we put up with unreliable machinery and suppliers as the effects are hidden from view by the amount of inventory that we can continue to work with.

A classic example of inventory in an India manufacturing firm is to make a huge stock of spare parts of all the machinery , in order to avoid sudden breakdown of machine.

We always scare of machine breakdown which will eventually cause the delay in supply of produced goods, instead  of taking preventive measure to avoid breakdown we always prepare for the situation of breakdown , thinking that , it’s a machine and it can go down any given time.

Motion:

The waste of motion is the movement within a process rather than the movement of material between processes (Transportation), you watch someone at work and see how often they end up having to stretch too far, have to re orientate their work-piece or perform some sort of gymnastic manoeuvre to achieve their work.

All of these movements take time and also have the potential to cause damage to product and stress to the individual. The earliest records of motion studies go back to the start of the 20th Century with Frank Gilbreth who studied bricklayers, his observation of the constant bending down to retrieve heavy bricks from ground level 

rather than the bricks being available at a more comfortable height were the start of motion studies.

It is far better to have products and equipment in a potion that is easily and comfortably reached without delays and without stress.

The waste of motion can also be applied to machines, how often have you watched a machine travel for ten or twenty seconds before it actually reaches the product and starts to perform some actual work?

Waiting:

Waiting is one of the 7 Wastes that most people recognize easily.  Eliminating time spent waiting has been a focus of manufacturing improvement activities since the industrial age started.  The motivation to eliminate wait time has been the driving force behind many of the other wastes.  

For example, to eliminate any chance of an employee waiting, large queues of WIP would be accumulated throughout the production process.  Reducing wait time is an essential objective and important component of lean, but it is just one of the seven wastes.

When people think of wait time, most picture a worker in front of a machine waiting for material to arrive or for the machine to cycle.  This is one of the common types of wait time, but there are more subtle instances that are every bit as costly.  Wait times are a major challenge in supply chain operations, as companies must wait days or weeks to replenish raw materials.  Wait times also occur in many administrative functions, including the delays in the flow of information or approvals from one department to another, or the delay of waiting for an open position to be filled.

The Waste of Waiting is exactly that, waiting for machines, products, people, information, etc.

How many times a day do you find yourself waiting for something in both work and in your personal life, after all why do they call some of these places waiting rooms! We spend a lot of our time waiting for various reasons, previous operations over-running, deliveries not arriving, people and machines not being reliable and so on!

Imagine if you could eliminate all of these problems that lead to you having to wait, how much time would you gain back in your day to do something productive.

Overproduction:

Overproduction is producing something either before it is needed or in too great a quantity resulting in Work in Progress (WIP) and finished goods stock.

This inventory that you have produced costs you money, either your own cash that you have to invest, or money from the bank that you have to pay additional interest on! It also takes up space in your company, it has to be stored somewhere, it also has to be transported around, usually by fork lift trucks due to the amount of material involved, all of these again additional costs.

But we do we overproduce, a big reason is that it is what we have always done, we produce big batches of material and hope that the customer will buy it, hopefully we produce based on some sort of forecast, but not always! Why do we have big batches, normally because some of the machines that we use take time to set up, so to ensure we use them efficiently we try to maximize the amount of time that they run for to minimize the relative time taken in setting up.

We also have big batches because we don't trust our suppliers and other internal processes, we have stock to give us some comfort, comfort that should something go wrong we still have plenty of stock to keep us busy while the problems are resolved.

We also have large amounts of inventory due to processes within our production being unbalanced, that is one produces faster or slower than the other causing inventory to build between them. Rather than slow one down or work to speed the other up we just blindly produce as fast as we can, after all in many companies the operator will earn his bonus!

Over processing:

Processing activities are typically viewed as value added.  It is the manufacturing processes that add value to the product and to the customer.  Despite this, the process isn't valuable to the customer.  The resultant change to the product is what may be valuable to the customer.  This is an important distinction, because it is critical to assess every activity when eliminating waste.  It is easy to assume a process in the middle of a production line is essential, but under examination, many processes are found to unnecessary or overly complicated.

Simplifying processes is critical to the lean methodology, and it is at the core of eliminating processing waste.  Each activity in the production process should be assessed in detail.  The activity must add value to the customer, and must be an activity that cannot be accomplished automatically.  Otherwise, the activity should be eliminated or consolidated with other processes.  As with the other wastes, it is important to examine every activity or process through the lens of lean.  For this reason, it is preferable to look at all processes as potential waste.  This differs from the view of some lean practitioners who describe this waste as over processing, and encourage the acceptance of processing as value added.

Over Processing is when we do work that the customer has not explicitly asked for, such as polishing areas that do not require polishing or defining tolerances and specifications far in excess of what is actually required.

How many engineering drawings have you looked at where the designer has specified an incredibly tight tolerance that requires high tech machinery to achieve when the reality of the product could mean that the tolerance could be far wider without any problems and less expensive to achieve.

Defects:

Poor quality and the resulting defects are a major source of cost for many companies.  This is also a cost that is often under reported as there are direct and indirect effects of defects.  A defect is any error in a process that makes a product or service less valuable to a customer, or that requires additional processing to correct the defect.

The adoption of lean at many companies started with a focus on quality.  Total Quality Management was a major manufacturing initiative before lean was adopted on a widespread basis.  It was easy for a company to recognize that defects were wasteful.  As a result, quality initiatives designed to reduce and eliminate defects are often some of the most mature lean initiatives in a company.

Defects are what most people think of when you talk about waste, but these are only one small part of the seven wastes.

Defects cost a lot more than what most people think, it is not just the cost of the defect itself think about what then has to happen; we have to rework the product or service, sometimes at the site of the customer. We have to fill in defect reports and have problem solving meetings. We have already lost the time and capacity spent producing the part, then we have to reschedule and use more time and capacity to produce replacements.

Defect costs are normally depicted as an iceberg, the main costs hidden beneath the surface out of sight, most estimates suggest that the true cost of a defect is around ten times higher than the initial cost!

The 8th waste is known as ‘untapped human potential’ and means that the people who work in your business know all kinds of things that could improve the business, but aren't telling you. They will see things differently to you. They will see things that you won’t. You need to take advantage of this.

Getting engagement with any kind of change program is usually a challenge for most businesses, but one of the simplest ways to do this with Lean is go ‘waste walking’. It’s a bit like playing the childhood game of eye spy, with the list above as the items you are looking for. Taking your team’s observations, adding in a little bit of problem solving, and (hey presto!) you have an improvement plan ready to execute.

So if you’d like to improve productivity and on time delivery performance (without the usual hassles), try using all the brainpower in your team to help you strip out the unnecessary lead time and complexity from your processes. It’s a great way to make the improvements you seek.

Go for a walk with your team and get your improvement projects back on track! -Giles Johnston