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THE WASTE OF DEFECTS
Defects are one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing or 7 mudas, defects are
when products or service deviate from what the customer requires or the specification.
When you talk about waste most people think of defects rather than the other wastes
such as waiting and transportation.
Defects are one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing.
The Costs of the waste of Defects
There has been much written regarding the cost of defectives, the reason being that
the cost is not always what we perceive it to be. The cost of rejects and rework are
often compared to an iceberg; only a small fraction of the true cost being visible above
the water level.
In addition to the obvious cost of the initial scrap item we have a number of other costs
that are not always obvious or considered although frequently far in excess of this initial
cost. The general rule of thumb is to multiply the cost of the scrap by a factor of ten to
arrive at the true cost to your business.
There are costs associated with problem solving, materials, rework, rescheduling
materials, setups, transport, paperwork, increased lead times, delivery failures and
potentially lost customers who will take their custom elsewhere.
Causes of the Waste of Defects
Defects can be caused by many different problems, many that should be avoidable
with a little thought when designing your products, processes and equipment.
Many defects are caused by incorrect method due to non-standard operations,
differences in the way that processes are undertaken by different operators on different
shifts.
We also build the opportunity for errors into our products by failing to think about how
items can be assembled when we design them, we have components that can be
assembled incorrectly if the operators do not align them correctly and so on.
We fail to maintain our equipment, machines and fixtures allowing defects to occur.
We dont have a culture that empowers and makes our operators confident enough to
highlight problems and allow them to be solved, they often continue and make the best
of a poorly fitting component rather than stopping to have either the fixtures or the
components corrected.
We dont provide training to our people; we throw them straight in at the deep end and
tell them to do the same as the guy stood beside them, often the one that was thrown
in there the week before.

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We also reward the wrong behaviors, paying for quantity rather than quality,
encouraging our employees to work as fast as possible and even penalizing them if
they do not make the numbers with little thought to the consequences on the quality of
our products or services.
Examples of wastes of Defects

Scrap produced by poorly maintained fixtures.

Parts assembled with the incorrect orientation.

Missing screws and other fixing due to lack of controls.

Incorrect components used due to incorrect, or missing instructions.
Poorly made components that continued to be made as the employees wanted
to reach their performance bonus.
Parts damaged due to excessive handling.

Faulty parts that have reached the customer.

How to eliminate or reduce Defects

There are many techniques out there to help you to identify and eliminate wastes;
however within lean manufacturing we wish to prevent them occurring in the first place.
This prevention of defects is achieved by a number of different techniques from
autonomation / Jidoka (Machines with human intelligence that are able to detect when
a non standard event has occurred) through to Pokayoke devices that detect if a
product is defective, either preventing the process from running or highlighting the
defect for action.
We also implement standard operations procedures (SOP) and training to ensure that
the correct methods are undertaken and standards achieved.
The most important factor however is the empowerment of teams to solve and prevent
their own problems. By harnessing the talents of your employees you are able to
quickly and efficiently prevent the occurrence of defects.

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THE WASTE OF INVENTORY

Inventory is one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (or 7 Mudas). Inventory is
the raw materials, work in progress (WIP) and finished goods stock that is held, we
often hold far more than is required to produce goods and services when the customer
wants them using Just in Time (JIT) principles.
Costs of the waste of Inventory
Every piece of inventory you hold has a physical cost associated with it, that cost is
shouldered directly by yourself either from your cash or from borrowings for which you
will be charged interest. Remember that for any business cash is king, if you tie it up
in inventory it is not available for you to use elsewhere in your business.
In addition to the physical costs of your inventory you also have a host of less obvious
costs that are cut directly from your profit, these are areas such as the transportation
and movement of this inventory, the space required to store it, the containers to store it
in, the administration of keeping track of it, the damage and losses that occur during
transportation, the cost of writing off materials that become obsolete, even the costs of
insuring it.
There are many costs associated with this inventory, some not as obvious as others, it
causes your lead times to be increased as well as your costs, this can lead to
customers being dissatisfied and taking their business elsewhere.
Inventory hides other forms of waste
One of the reasons for overproduction is a mistrust of our suppliers, process and even
our customers that causes us to put in place comfort stock to give us a buffer if things
dont go according to our plans; plans that are often wrong!
Because this comfort stock is in place it buffers against the problems that occur so that
they fail to give us the pain that they would otherwise, this leads us to ignore those
problems as they are not important! But these are all costing us money!
The level of inventory is like the sea, if you drop that level then you begin to expose the
rocks below and have to act to either remove them or reduce their size so the ship of
production can continue to sail on without being sunk!
The Sea of Inventory Hides other Wastes.

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Causes of the Waste of Inventory.
The main causes of the waste of inventory is that of the waste of overproduction,
making more than the customer wants or in advance of customer demand, these two
wastes are heavily interlinked and you should read up on the waste of overproduction.
It can also be caused by poor layout and lack of balance in your workflow causing
inventory to build up before or after different processes. This is a good indication of
poor flow within your processes and one that a good lean practitioner will look for when
observing your organization.
Examples of wastes of Inventory
Inventory can be observed in many areas of a business, as either raw materials that
have been ordered in excess of customer requirements due to mistrust of suppliers or
to take advantage of bulk discounts to the large amounts of finished goods sitting in
your warehouse just in case a customer orders them.
In addition to this we can see levels of inventory building up in front of processes that
are slower than the preceding processes and visa versa. We also see large batches of
materials being moved around due to machine setups requiring us to run over sized
batches to ensure we make good use of our machines.
How to eliminate or reduce Inventory
The first thing is to work to the main principles of lean manufacturing, making value
flow at the pull of the customer, the idea of Just in Time (JIT) production. This will
cause us to remove the main cause of inventory that of overproduction.
Look at factory and cell layout and balance your production processes to ensure that
work in progress does not build up between processes, it is not important to run every
machine as fast as it can be run, at the end of the day we only need to make things as
quickly as the customer wants them, no faster; takt time (the time interval between
customer call off) and Kanban can be used to help ensure that we balance our
processes and prevent the build up of inventory.
Inventory as I have already mentioned hides all other problems, even if you implement
flow with Kanban systems you should look to continue to keep dropping your inventory
(comfort levels) to expose more and more of the rocks enabling you to make your
processes more and more reliable.

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http://leanmanufacturingtools.org/96/the-waste-of-motion-causes-symptoms-solutions/
THE WASTE OF MOTION
Motion is one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing or the 7 mudas. Waste being
a process step that is not value adding, moving is not necessarily working! If you have
read the page regarding value add and non value add then you will understand that
only a process step that transforms the product in some manner that the customer
explicitly wants is a value adding step, moving product does not transform it any way
therefore is a waste.
Motion as a waste has a long history, being highlighted by Frank Gilbreth within his
motion studies at the start of the twentieth century; he observed bricklayers bending
to lift heavy bricks from floor level and showed that delivering the bricks to the workers
at the level they were required made a huge increase in the working efficiency as well
as reducing strain induced injuries.
Whilst we may not be able to eliminate all motion within a work cell we can work to
minimize it and make each movement as stress free as possible.
Symptoms of the waste of Motion
The waste of motion in your process gives rise to a number of problems that are either
immediately obvious or hidden beneath the surface waiting to rise up and bite you in
the future. The first and most obvious is a lowering of your work efficiency, if your
workers are spending their times lifting, retrieving, and searching rather than actually
assembling then your work efficiency will be very low.
A less obvious problem potentially is the harm that unnecessary motion can cause in
the long term, constantly lifting items (even those that are not excessively heavy) from
a pallet at floor level can cause muscle and back strains that can lead to sickness and
absenteeism in your workforce. Even a machine that has to move excessive distances
within its cycle will be subjected to additional wear in bearings and joints leading to
premature breakdowns.
Causes of the Waste of Motion
The main causes of the waste of motion are with regards to cell layout, placing product
at floor level on pallets, poorly arranged space, tools that are disorganized, lack of
space and organization for component parts and so on.
Another problem can be the design of your working method, does it cause you to
constantly turn and rearrange the product being worked on? Design of the product itself
can impact in the same manner.

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Examples of wastes of Motion
A machine that travels excessive distance from start point to where it begins work.

Heavy objects placed on low or high shelves.

Searching for tools and equipment.

Walking across work space to retrieve components or use machines.

Constantly turning and moving product during assembly.

Having to reorient component when taken from its location.

Reaching excessive distances when taking components and tools.

How to eliminate or reduce the waste of Motion

Whilst there will always be some form of motion within your process it should be
minimized as much as possible, both to reduce overburden (Muri) and to improve your
efficiencies; this is a benefit to you and your employees as you are making their work
easier.
The simplest and most powerful lean manufacturing tool at your disposal to eliminate
the waste of motion within your work cells is that of 5S; 5S challenges your team to
review each and every step of their operation and eliminate the symptoms of the seven
wastes. These changes will on the whole cost you nothing other than the time of your
team but will result in efficiency gains in the order of 10% to 30% in most cases as well
as making your work area safer preventing accidents (and the law suit that follows.)
5S also starts the ball rolling with regard to standardized operations, it should lead you
to develop standard operating procedures (SOP) for your processes defining the best
way to conduct a specific operation.
The lean tool of single minute exchange of Die (SMED) will also remove many wasteful
motions from your setup process, using similar principles to 5S, they are applied to the
setup process of your work and will often reduce setups from hours to single minutes.
Motion is a significant factor within the seven wastes and every effort should be made
to remove it from your processes to both increase efficiencies as well as make work
easier for all those involved. Movement is not work, but it costs you time and money; so
look to lean tools such as 5S to help you reduce and eliminate excessive motion from
your processes.

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http://leanmanufacturingtools.org/121/waste-of-overprocessing-causes-symptoms-examplesand-solutions/
THE WASTE OF OVERPROCESSING
Overprocessing is one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (or 7 mudas);
Overprocessing is adding more value to a product than the customer actually requires
such as painting areas that will never be seen or be exposed to corrosion.
The costs of the waste of Overprocessing
Overprocessing is one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing
By adding work that is not required, Overprocessing costs you money with regards to
the time of your staff, the materials used and the wear on your equipment. These costs
can amount to a considerable sum over a period of time, they will also reduce your
efficiencies as the operators that are Overprocessing could be performing other value
adding tasks that the customer is willing to pay you for.
Causes of the Waste of Overprocessing
Overprocessing as one of the seven wastes is caused by having unclear standards and
specifications, many operators will try to do the best job possible and will not always be
aware of what truly adds value to the product or even the end use. They will therefore
often expend time polishing and finishing components that do not require it.
Another issue is the one of non-standardized working practices, unless you have
standardized working then you will have differences in methods between different shifts
and different people.
The most common issue is to do with design, often designers specify tolerances that
require precision machining when in reality looser tolerances that could be produced by
significantly less expensive methods could be employed.
Examples of wastes of Overprocessing

Painting areas that will never be seen or be affected by corrosion.

Over polishing an area that does not require it.
Tolerances that are too tight.

Within a company that I used to work in many years ago, we produced rubber
components for the automotive industry, we cut these components to length (anywhere
from 1M to 3M) with a tolerance of +/- 1mm. These then had to be measured and
documented on SPC charts to ensure that capability was maintained. Engineers
worked hard on trying to design machines that could cut these products to the
tolerances required.
These products were then joined together end to end to form a circular seal, this in use
was stretched around another component; stretched far beyond its actual length at rest
like a rubber band.
The tolerance was a joke and the measuring also, as long as the piece of rubber was
at least 10%-20% smaller than the final component it would work fine in operation. The
measurements conducted were also a sham as the operators could either stretch or
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compress the components to get any measurement they wished! All of this is relative to
the waste of Overprocessing.
How to eliminate or reduce Overprocessing
To prevent the waste of overprocessing there are a number of simple steps that can be
undertaken, as part of your initial 5S implementation instigate the use of Standard
Operating Procedures (SOP) to provide written instructions for all of your employees.
This is extremely easy in todays age of digital cameras and word processing
packages.
These SOPs will ensure the standardization of methods across shifts and personnel,
combined with on the job training they are an highly effective way to improve the quality
of your product as well as ensuring the reduction in Overprocessing. These SOPs
combined with quality standards can also help with regard to clarifying specifications
and acceptance standards.
Review designs with techniques such as value engineering and value analysis to
identify opportunities to remove tolerances that are too tight.
Examine your process routes, are you using expensive processes where there are
simpler cheaper methods?

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THE WASTE OF OVERPRODUCTION
Overproduction is the worst of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (7 Mudas),
overproduction is making products in too great a quantity or before it is actually needed
leading to excessive inventory. Overproduction is the worst of the seven wastes as it
obscures all of the other problems within your processes.
The principles of Lean Manufacturing require you to make what the customer wants
when they want it, pulling only what is ordered through your work flow. Just In Time
manufacturing is possible in any industry with ingenuity and improving technology.
Overproduction is the worst of the seven wastes.
Costs of the waste of Overproduction
Overproducing causes you to tie up your capital in stock, raw materials, work in
progress (WIP) and finished goods. Your cash is what you rely upon to run your
business, so you either leave yourself short or you end up paying charges to your
bank. Many businesses have failed because they cannot buy raw materials to service a
customer because they have already put their cash into materials that are not required.
Another cost associated with Overproduction is to do with the storage and movement
of the inventory that you have created, it all requires space, it needs people and
equipment to move it around and it needs containers for storage. All of this is a cost to
you, if you could eliminate it the savings would be straight back on your bottom line
improving your profit.
Causes of the Waste of Overproduction
Why do we overproduce? Often the answer is as simple as because this is how we
have always done it! I have over the years been into many companies that run huge
batches of material creating enormous amounts of stock where they could easily
reduce the batches and improve their flow reducing lead times and improving customer
service. (I will relate a case study below to highlight this.)
We produce large batches because of long setups on some of our machines, so we try
to maximize our throughput of these machines and use economical batch quantities
to dictate how much material is processed rather than what the customer wants.
We also distrust our suppliers ability to supply what we need, so we order more than
we need and sooner than we need it to ensure that we have it when we need it, this
additional stress that we place on our suppliers often causes them to fail becoming a
self fulfilling prophecy.
We also distrust the reliability of our own processes and plan to allow for interruptions
in the flow of production, often scheduling a few days or even weeks between
successive operations just in case of issues or the need to change the production plan.

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We plan in many of our delays and inventory and many ERP and MRP systems add to
this problem.
We also work to forecasts; we guess what the customer will want in the future and
invariably make mistakes and thus build product that is unwanted and dont build what
the customers really want.
Examples of Wastes of Overproduction
Overproduction causes inventory which hides many of the seven wastes
I am going to relay a short case study regarding the waste of overproduction and
inventory to highlight what many companies are guilty of; I went to a factory in the UK
several years back to discuss a request for government grant money.
The owner of the factory was after a fairly small grant to purchase a machine to speed
up his production capabilities, however the government was not giving out money at
the time for these uses but it was suggested that I might be able to find ways to help
him to free up cash within his business.
It was a family run business producing boxed games, art sets and similar products for
direct shipment to toy shops and wholesalers across the UK and Europe. The owner
had been the CEO for I think approaching 50 years; the business being around 150
years old!
I walked around the business and took some rough times of what people were doing
within the business to be able to do some rough models to demonstrate what I thought
were some pretty obvious issues to the owner.
The factory was split into two roughly equal parts, one a production hall and the other a
warehouse, both employed almost equal amounts of people. The products were
assembled in the production hall in small efficient little cells, but made in large batches
to be stored in the warehouse. The warehouse then took each customer order and
teams of store people would roam the warehouse to pick the orders, pack, and ship
them.
It was clear that it actually took the stores people far longer to actually find and retrieve
the products than the production people took to make them! Sometimes stocks were
lost and had to be made anew, being found at a later date hidden behind other
products.
The company held over a full year of production in finished goods stock, as well as raw
materials the value of which I could not get. They wrote off 5% or more of this stock
each and every year as games became obsolete, the products just being sent to
landfill.
The grant that was required was less than one tenth of a percent of this stock. The
business had made a loss for three years running and was threatened with closure.
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I showed him how the business could be run with next to no finished goods, how he
could move to smaller premises (His factory was fully owned in a prime city center
residential area), how he could expand his production into new areas using the surplus
staff and so on! However he repeatedly stated that his company could not function
without stock!
I bought in several other visitors to visit this company to persuade the owner, got all of
his management on our side, but still he failed to change and the company was closed
by the banks almost a year later with no improvements! All because he did not believe
that his business could be run without stock.
This is an extreme case with regard to the inability and reluctance to change, however
the overproducing product for stock is not unusual and I see it in almost every company
that I visit and still do! All because this is the way that we have always done it! But we
are no longer in the days of the model T Ford, we need to be quick and we need to be
flexible with our organizations to produce what the customers want when they want it!
The other causes of overproduction are to do with producing large batches of material
in excess (or in advance) of customer orders because the setup times of our machines
are excessive, this causes us to run economic bath quantities through the machines
to maximize our utilization of these machines.
We also overproduce to allow for failure of unreliable processes, machines and even
suppliers; producing more than we require just in case of failure. The excess inventory
produced then allows us to continue production even if we have failures.
How to eliminate or reduce Overproduction
The first step is to realize that we are doing it; understand that we are often planning
our own delays and large batches just because we always have done so. Many
planning packages such as ERP and MRP amplify these problems; I have often (in fact
on reflection in every case) switched off the planning modules on these software
packages in every company that I have been to with lead time and delivery issues.
Once we understand the issues we need to implement the principles of lean
manufacturing, identify the value stream using tools such a value stream mapping,
process mapping, spaghetti diagrams and a host of analytical tools that are available to
us. Then we need to make that value flow by rearranging our work place, creating
production cells that contain all of the required processes and moving away from
functional layouts. Using smaller, simpler, dedicated machines rather than super
machines that have to handle every product in the factory.
We need to tackle set up times on our equipment to enable the production of smaller
batches using the technique of SMED, Single Minute Exchange of Die.

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Once we have done this we can use the ideas of just in time manufacturing to enable
the production of product only when it is ordered, using techniques such as Kanban to
enable the Pull of production through our processes.
In doing this we not only eliminate the overproduction in our processes but we begin to
eliminate and highlight the causes of many other problems within our processes that
are hidden by all of this inventory. Schaefer Shelving offers a plethora of storage
solutions and inventory management systems that help eliminate overproduction while
streamlining the overall production process.

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http://leanmanufacturingtools.org/101/waste-of-transport-causes-symptoms-examplessolutions/
THE WASTE OF TRANSPORT
Transport is one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (muda), it is the movement
of products from one location to another. This could be from the machining shop to the
welding shop, or from the production facility in china to the assembly line in America.
This transportation adds no value to the product, it does not transform it and the
customer would not be happy in paying for it!
If you look at Toyota where the tools and techniques behind Lean Manufacturing have
been refined as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS) you will see that many of
their suppliers ate located close to their plants. Products are not shipped huge
distances at great cost with the potential for delay and damage.
Costs of the waste of Transport
The waste of transport is a disease that causes the company to hemorrhage money at
an alarming rate; you have to pay for material handling equipment, staff to operate it,
training, safety precautions, extra space for the movement of material and so forth.
Transportation often leads to operations having to wait for product to be delivered due
to delays (the waste of waiting), thus costing you more money as well as extending
your lead times and creating delivery problems.
Excessive transport also gives many opportunities for handling damage and losses, I
know of several cases where high value products have been damaged or lost,
including generator sets that are the size of a 40 foot container and whole shipments of
BMW cars that have gone down with the ship!
Causes of the Waste of Transportation.
There are many causes that contribute to the waste of transport, the main one being
the waste of overproduction which in turn leads to the waste of inventory; inventory that
then has to be transported throughout your facility or between factories and even
continents. The causes of this overproduction can be everything from excessive setup
times and the need for economic batch sizes to the fact that that is the way we have
always done it!
In addition to overproduction our organizations layouts often lead to the need to
transport product, we are often organized in functional silos, that is we have discreet
areas for specific functions such as welding, pressing, molding etc. This leads to the
need to transport product from each of these areas to the next and at times back again
after each function is completed.
Even within each functional area we tend to leave excessive gaps between operations
requiring the need to use things like pump trucks to move product about.
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Examples of wastes of Transport

The transport of product from one functional area such as pressing, to another
area such as welding.
The use of material handling devices to move batches of material from one
machine to another within a work cell.
The shipment of product from one functional factory to another.
The transportation of cheaper components from one country to another.

How to eliminate or reduce Transportation

Layout should be changed as per the principles of lean manufacturing, create value
streams and make that value flow at the pull of the customer. This requires you to have
production lines or cells that contain all of the value adding processes rather than a
functional layout. It also means reducing the spaces between those operations and
avoiding the use of super machines by using small dedicated (often cheaper)
machines instead. Improving factory layout through the use of value stream mapping
and process mapping can give huge savings in time and money, often with little cost
involved relative to the savings to be made.
With regard to the problems caused by the waste of overproduction follow this link to
read about the ways to eliminate and reduce overproduction which will in turn reduce
the amount of inventory in the system which will need to be transported.

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THE WASTE OF WAITING
Waiting is one of the seven wastes of lean manufacturing (or 7 mudas), it is the act of
doing nothing or working slowly whilst waiting for a previous step in the process. How
many times have you seen operators stood waiting for a previous operation, a delivery
of products to arrive or just slowly working so as not to highlight that they have run out
of materials.
The Costs of the waste of Waiting
You pay for the time spent by all of your employees, time that they do not spend adding
value while they are waiting. Waiting is not something that your customer is going to
want to pay for, the cost of the time spent waiting will come direct from your profit, for
every penny you can save it is a penny put straight back into your profit.
Often the time spent waiting is made up later during overtime at a premium rate, good
for your employees but not so good for your profit.
Causes of the Waste of Waiting
Unbalanced processes are a cause of waiting in your flow, if one process takes longer
than the next then the operators will either be stood there idle waiting or they will be
performing their tasks at a speed that makes it appear that they have work to complete.
Unreliable processes also cause waiting, the next process either waiting for the
previous due to breakdowns, quality issues, information, or for an overlong changeover
to be completed.
The waste of Overproduction and waste of Inventory also cause the waste of waiting,
this is due to the fact that this material has to be transported (another waste) from one
location to the next usually as a large batch. The material handling is often a limited
resource and the processes are left waiting for the forklift truck to appear or for a
neighbor to finish using the pump truck and so on.
Information (or lack of it) can also cause waiting, either through unclear or missing
information to conduct an operation or even through waiting to know which product is
required to be run next.
Examples of wastes of Waiting

Operators / Machines standing idle whilst they wait for a previous processes
production to be sorted due to quality problems.
Waiting for a breakdown to be resolved.

Waiting for a previous process to complete a batch of material prior to

movement.
Waiting for the forklift truck to deliver a batch of components.

Waiting for information from the engineering department.

Waiting to be told which product is required next.

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Operators waiting or working slowly whilst waiting for a previous operation to

complete its cycle.

How to eliminate or reduce Waiting

Balancing of your production processes using Takt time and Yamazumi boards will
help ensure that the processes are better matched with regards to cycle times.
Improving machine reliability and quality using Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)
and quality tools.
Reducing overproduction and inventory to minimize transport and movement between
and within cells.
Implement Standard Operating Procedures to ensure that standards and methods are
clear.
Use visual methods of planning combined with daily cell meetings to ensure that
everyone is clear what is required for the day.

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