Wastes of lean in manufacturing, office, software and services

Lean manufacturing identifies wastes different to a conventional organization. Lean defines value of a product from the customer’s point of view. So any process, activity or addition is a waste if it does not add value to the final product or the service. When we start describing wastes form this angle we will start identifying many wastes which we thought initially are value additions.

Most studies show us that every organization is wasting most of their resources. Some say the value addition is only about 5% of the total activities. Isn’t that amazing? Most of the times we waste up to 95% of our resources. If we look at this in a more customer oriented manner, we can deliver the same product or the service with very high quality only for a fraction of its cost within a very short lead time.

But we can not eliminate all the wastes from the system. This is mainly due to technical and other practical limitations. For an example we might not be able to seamlessly integrate the suppliers with the manufacturing unit due to transportation problems. So wastes are categorized in to two main categories as avoidable and unavoidable wastes. In lean all these wastes is categorized in to eight (seven traditional wastes plus one) categories. They are;

1. Over production
2. Waiting
3. Transportation
4. Inappropriate tooling
5. Higher WIP
6. Ergonomic problems(higher movement)
7. Defects
8. Underutilization of human resource

Since lean concepts are applied in various industries apart from manufacturing, these wastes can be described in offices, software development and even in services. In this series of articles I am planning to describe each of the waste categories identified in lean manufacturing in the areas of office, software and service contexts apart from traditional manufacturing context. So look forward for the lean waste series in next few weeks.