7 Wastes of Lean and How to Streamline Your Operations to Avoid Them

Everyone wants to do more with less. But in business, finding reliable ways to do more is easier said than done. Entire consulting industries have risen based on the shaky promise of finding those types of solutions. Do solutions really exist? 

Transportation 

Each of the 7 wastes of lean is shorthand for specific business processes. For example, under lean, transportation waste refers to the movement of your product or the resources used in its production. 

Every time your business moves a resource, it introduces the risk of that resource getting damaged, lost, or simply delayed in reaching its destination. Once you identify a transportation waste, the improvement you must make is often either a change to your worksite that eliminates the need to move as much or a change in process that eliminates the need for transportation entirely. 

Inventory 

Inventory waste is a bottleneck. This waste occurs when you have excess material waiting to be processed. Since that material isn’t ready to be sold to a customer, it represents an outlay of capital that is sitting idle. It has to be counted and safeguarged.

Lean thinking looks to reduce the volume of idle inventory as much as possible. But of course, depending on your work environment, it might be impossible to eliminate inventory waste completely, but a lean organization will seek to minimize it. 

Motion 

Whereas transportation waste occurs when your product and its constituent materials move, motion waste occurs when your employees or production systems make an unnecessary movement. For example, every time a worker moves, they increase fatigue and their risk of injury. Or every time a system makes an unnecessary movement that increases the chance of wear or damage. 

Waiting 

Under lean, unnecessary idling time is called the waste of waiting. This applies to your people or your production systems like with motion waste. If it is sitting idle waiting to do work, it is wasted. 

Waiting waste often occurs due to a lack of coordination among your different operating units. But it can also appear when your business processes are unreliable when attempting to batch work unnecessarily or during uncoordinated shift changes. 

Overproduction 

Overproduction is what most people think of when they think of “waste.” This is when you produce too much of a product or service, or produce it at the wrong time.  

You can just as likely overproduce a digital asset as you could a physical one. For example, if you have an automated management system sending nightly reports that go unread because readers don’t see value in them, you’re overproducing reports. 

You can eliminate overproduction waste through better planning and forecasting. To do that, you need good data to know how much of a given product or service is needed at which time and in which location.  

Overprocessing 

Overprocessing—or overbuilding—is when your employees or systems spend resources to make a product or service past the point at which a customer values it and is willing to pay for it. Overprocessing waste can occur when your employees are not properly trained, or your understanding of customer needs is off-target. 

It is obviously important for your organization to provide quality products and services, but it is equally important to know when enough is enough, and devoting more time and resources would be wasteful. As with many other lean wastes here, identifying that tipping point requires good data. 

Defects 

Defects of waste arise when a product or service must be remanufactured, repaired, or rescheduled. You can waste a great deal of time and effort thanks to even small errors in production. 

To eliminate the need for repairs or reprocessing, you need to identify the root cause of the defect. Was it human error? Improper training? A miscalibrated system? That's the process you need to address. 

Staff use handheld scanners constantly in shipping and distribution centers. Having a working scanner on hand is so important for warehouse workers that at one Real Time Networks’ customer location, workers would regularly hide their favorite known-working scanners around the warehouse. 

This problem became so acute that management completely lost track of how many scanners they owned. They had a waste of inventory – too many resources purchased and going unused.  

They purchased an AssetTracer system that could manage the tracking and distribution of all of their scanners at the beginning and end of shifts. If staff didn’t return a scanner on time, the supervisor would receive a report with the user's identity who signed it out so the supervisor could immediately investigate the problem. As a result of eliminating the scanner hoarding, this company discovered they needed 15-20% less devices than they had previously. 

Optimize your warehouse management with our guide:

[Download] Best Practices for Equipment Management in Distribution Centers

Law Enforcement

Police officers rely on a large amount of equipment to keep themselves and the public safe. Some of that kit they maintain themselves, other kit they must sign out from an equipment manager at the start of their shift. In a busy precinct, it can take each officer several minutes every day to get what they need. Multiply that time by every officer, every shift over a year, and you have a significant waiting waste. 

KeyTracer and AssetTracer systems have easy-to-use automated access terminals. As a result, officers at many customer agencies can sign out all of the gear they need in seconds to get on the road fast. 

Hospitality & Gaming

In the last few years, more and more hotels have sought better process control over housekeeping operations to maximize how efficiently they could get guests into their rooms. They had a waste of waiting and also a waste of defects. If a housekeeper needed to be pulled away from one task to handle an urgent room turnover, they would need to reschedule and redo other work. 

To combat these wastes, hotels now provision tablets to housekeepers to provide up-to-the-second insights on room turnover progress. Frontdesk staff can monitor in real time when rooms are ready. 

However, all of those tablets require management and storage. As a result, many hotels and other hospitality venues have turned to Real Time Networks for automated asset storage solutions for their tablets and mobile devices. 

Fleet Management

The City of Saint John, New Brunswick, recently deployed a KeyTracer system to help manage their newly centralized vehicle fleet. Their fleet manager had discovered vehicles of a certain class were drastically underutilized. As a result, they had a waste of inventory and a waste of transportation, with excessive damage from vehicle use raising maintenance costs. The KeyTracer system allowed the City to save over $150,000 per year in vehicle costs, while maintaining a smaller, remotely-managed pool of passenger vehicles without compromising availability.