Taiichi Ohno, inventor of the Toyota production system, analysed the different activities that take place in production and identified seven of them that do not give added value (the seven wastes or Muda) from the customer’s perspective:

1. Overproduction: producing more (or sooner) than requested by the customer. A few examples: sending, to a customer who requests a transaction to be performed, a file containing a copy of the original fax, a printout of the transaction and an indication of the time the transaction was processed, etc.

2. Waiting. This concerns waiting for a product (e.g. credit file) in the system: for example, awaiting a signature from the doctor to approve handing over a file to the patient, awaiting verification, awaiting an additional document or a machine repair.

3. Unnecessary inventory. Stocks in production activities are considered as waste since they are expensive and offer nothing to the customer. Examples include office supplies, bottles or syringes in large quantities, putting large batches into production.

4. Transportation. Transporting products between buildings or moving files from one department to another is an example of activity that carries a cost but does not provide any value as far as the customer is concerned.

5. Defects. Obviously, producing poor quality leads to delays for the customer or an additional cost if the operation is started from scratch.

6. Inappropriate processing. This example of waste involves doing more to the product than is necessary: too many steps in a process, too many checks, bottlenecks, non-standardised steps and risks of breakdown. This is the most difficult waste to avoid, because you need to learn how to view the process overall and eliminate working elements that are not strictly required.

7. Excess motion. All movements that are not necessary to perform an operation: bending down, travelling, moving to and from an office for repeated activities.

The objective, initially, is to learn to sharpen your ability to see the “Muda” in the current process flows, and develop an ongoing process for finding solutions to eliminate activities that provide no added value to the systems as a whole or individual steps.
As Taiichi Ohno said, “You have to think about how to get rid of the Muda you have seen. You just repeat this -always, everywhere, tirelessly and relentlessly”.

April 2007: Article no. 2: Synchronising flows