DOWNTIME: The Eight Types of Waste

Defect is a product or information that does not meet customer expectations. It could be a damaged or improperly functioning computer screen. In the service industry, it may take the shape of delivery of a courier shipment to the wrong address, or late delivery of a shipment to the consignee.

Overproduction is producing material or information more than required, or before being required by the downstream customer. For example, producing twenty tons of a product for a customer order of eighteen tons. Probably, the production manager intends to make up for some prospect defected quantity. Make-to-stock, rather than make-to-sell, is another shape of overproduction.

Waiting refers to a person or a machine being idle due to lack of information or material required to continue operation. Halting production on a machine for out-of-stock state is a prevalent form of Waiting waste.

Neglected Resources refers to neglecting, ignoring, or misusing the best resources available for the application at the time. This represents the underutilization of talents, state-of-the-art equipment, and advanced technology.

In my early career days as an Improvement Specialist, I developed dozens of Microsoft Office Access and Excel VBA-enabled macros. Such scripts converted manual accounting processes into automatic steps finishing in seconds. Failure to leverage existing resources is widespread in most workplaces.

Transportation is the unnecessary movement of material or information that does not add value to meet the customer’s requirements. For instance, frequent movement of raw materials from storage areas to the point of production is a common, unfavorable practice in the manufacturing industry.

Inventory represents material (raw or finished) or initial information in a queue. This is usually depicted in piles of finished goods in a warehouse made without customers’ orders. In the shop floor, inventory takes the form of work-in-progress (WIP) of partially finished goods awaiting processing by downstream processes.

Motion refers to unnecessary movement by people in a process. Excessive bending, walking, reaching, or any form of human body movement is considered a wasteful effort in the workplace. For that, meticulous facility planning should be practiced when setting up the layout and sequence of process steps to minimize motion.

Extra-processing is committed if more features, information, or work are provided than what is required by the customer. This form of waste is usually exhibited in excessive, unnecessary packaging of products. It can also be incurred when additional, unplanned process steps are performed to meet requirements.

In manufacturing, re-packing old products stored in a warehouse, to remove dirt or replace worn out packaging, is extra-processing that was unneeded in the first place.