By DMA Kulasooriya ISL- Certified Six Sigma Black Belt

Eight types of Wastes

What is Waste?
Waste is anything other than the minimum amount of equipment, materials, parts, space and worker's time, which are absolutely essential to add value to the product. (Fuji Cho, Chief Engineer at Toyota). More conversely, waste is anything that does not add value to the product or service.

The Antidote of Waste
Womack and Jones describe lean thinking as "THE ANTIDOTE OF MUDA" (muda means waste in Japanese) - any human activity that consumes resources but creates no value. The essence of lean thinking is elimination of waste wherever it exists within the individual firm, but also along the whole supply chain. Womack and Jones specify eight types of waste.

1.Defects Mistakes that require rectification
2. Overproduction of goods that are not needed
3. Inventories of goods awaiting further processing or consumption
4. Over processing steps which are not actually needed
5. Movement of employees from one place to another unnecessarily
6. Transport goods from one place to another without any purpose
7. Employees waiting either for a process to finish or because an upstream activity has not delivered on time
8. Design and goods and services which don't meet the needs of the customer

All these are human activities that consume resources more than the requirements, which don't add value at all to your business. More conversely, this has become the role model behaviour of the management and employees at all levels.

Lean Behaviour
Lean behaviours are defined simply as behaviours that add or create value. It is the minimization of waste associated with arbitrary or contradictory thoughts and actions that lead to defensive behaviour, ineffective methods, poor co-operation, and negative attitudes.

A person exhibiting lean behaviours is most easily recognizable by their ability to resist the temptation to contribute wasteful verbal or gestural content to conversations. In contrast, behaviours that inhibit work flow are analogous to wasteful batch and queue mass production methods.

These behaviours are termed "fat" behaviours, and are defined as behaviours that add no value and can be eliminated. The concept of waste has not yet been effectively extended to the self-defeating behaviours of individuals and groups of people in the workplace.

We work very hard to improve manufacturing productivity, yet place comparatively little emphasis on improving our own behaviours. Shop productivity takes precedence over behavioural productivity because money, defects, inventory, and time are much easier to measure.

In addition, the level of stress in competitive business settings can make it very difficult to eliminate behavioural waste. Humans have repeated the same mistakes for thousands of years (Senge, 1995), which shows that we rarely understand their root causes.

The persistently wasteful individual and group behaviours could be a reason why many large businesses fall well below the expectations of its stakeholders.