Examples of Waste Within Lean Manufacturing

Practically every industrial engineer and floor manager is familiar with the seven wastes of lean manufacturing. While this theory was originally developed by Toyota as a way to control waste at their fabrication facilities, the theory can apply to nearly every production floor.

Certainly a number of industry professionals have built careers around trying to eliminate these factors from a production facility.

Waiting

Employee time is one of the most expensive resources your company invests in. When production lines are ill-timed or maintenance delays employees from doing their jobs, those man hours can never be replaced.

Over-Production

Surplus production hurts your company’s profits in several ways. Firstly, the cost of extra materials and misuse of employee time cuts into your total profit.  Secondly, overages have to be stored, entailing warehouse costs.  Eventually, the product has to be sold. The surplus will increase the supply in a marketplace with low demand. This decreases the overall value of product on the market.

Rejects

Damaged product is a waste of both materials and labor. As the piece is discarded or recycled, a company must incur the costs of these operations.

Excess Motion

Few managers are overly concerned with excess motion; it is often assumed that this is a relatively minor waste. This waste is a more obvious concern at facilities with complicated fabrication processes. Each step in the creation process has the potential to waste time and energy if it is not running at maximum efficiency. While industrial engineers perform timing studies to reduce and eliminate these issues during the initial design of a production line, additional studies should be performed periodically. Any change in the fabrication process, machine set-up, employee set-up, or material used should trigger an automatic re-evaluation in order to eliminate the waste of excess motion.

Over-processing

Many managers tend to think of over-processing as spending too much time on product fabrication, but in actuality this can also refer to added steps in the production process or excess material in a product’s design. While a product redesign can be part of the solution, it might not be practical. Therefore, it is advisable to evaluate each stage of fabrication for efficiency. APS software can run simulations to determine more efficient methods of production without running up the costs of experimentation on the factory floor.

Transportation

While it is next to impossible to eliminate this cost entirely, there is a multitude of ways that companies waste resources during transportation. Inefficient schedules can result in trucks leaving one fabrication facility half-empty, while product in other facilities pile up in storage.