Eliminate Waste
A major problem for
many organisations and businesses is waste.
By this, I mean waste of time, inventory, over-engineering, delays and
others.
The Toyota Company developed a concept known as Kaizen, the purpose of which, as I
understand it, is to improve productivity (and therefore profitability) by
eliminating waste. The Kaizen concept identifies seven typical
types of waste to be found in any and every organisation, all of which can be
remembered using the simple acronym “TIM WOOD”:
- Transportation
- Inventory
- Motion
- Waiting
- Overproduction
- Overprocessing
- Defect
If you want to know
more about these types of waste, read any decent book on Kaizen or process
improvement and you will find their full definitions, but to keep it short:
Transportation:
moving something when you don’t really have to do it.
Inventory: surplus of raw materials or finished goods.
Motion: anything from looking for tools to do the job,
gathering information by looking through catalogs, walking back and forth
between operating areas.
Waiting: waiting for material or information.
Overproduction: making something you don’t need/don’t need
right now (typically resulting in “inventory” waste).
Over-processing: unnecessary packaging or “bells and
whistles” that the buyer doesn't really need.
Defect: producing substandard product/service
due to other wastes above...
I recently saw a small but typical example: the MD of a
company asked one of his staff to ask another member of staff (who wasn’t in
the office) to send out a memo to all other staff about an event. This was motion waste:
- Asking someone else to do something of which the MD was perfectly capable - especially as it was his invitation and wouldn't take long to write.
- Unnecessary request as the staff required to send the email wasn’t there.
When this was discovered, another member of staff:
- Produced and printed a memo giving details;
- Scanned and saved it to a pdf file;
- Attached it to an email and sent it out.
… a perfect example of “over-processing”. The details of the event (all of 10 lines)
could just as well have been sent as the original email by the MD himself...
When this sort of thing happens at the top, no wonder
there’s waste all the way down.
When thinking about wastage, ask a simple question about
each process: “Can we bill the customer for this?”
Yes? Keep it.
No? Look to eliminate, automate or streamline it.
Sometimes we have
to keep non-value adding processes (e.g. Health & Safety legislation, quality
control, documentation). These are known
as “non-value added, but necessary”. If
these are essential to producing a zero-defect product/service in safe
conditions, they stay. But… Make them as
streamlined as possible.
Productivity will rise; costs of doing business will
fall. Your staff may even be more
motivated…
How do you identify what needs to change? Ask the people on the production line or who
manage customer service. They’ll appreciate
most the wastage for both the organisation and its customers/users.
Expect and encourage brutal honesty.
What happens next is encouraging a bottom-up approach to
allow the “shop floor” to suggest, test and implement measures to minimise
waste. This may mean that something that
has “always been done this way” must change.
The “traditional” approach to improvement is top-down, with
managers cascading changes down their line, without realising that these may
impact others in the organisation. What
this means is that you need a cross-functional team and preferably people who
are as close as possible to the “action”.
The role of management is to facilitate change, not bring up self-serving objections to preserve
their position. If there’s a critical
Health & Safety issue or Quality Issue, that’s “non-value-added, but
necessary”. However, in most cases it’s
not insurmountable.
None of this happens without training. Don't expect people
to get it right if you don't show them what to do.
Once you do, sit back and prepare to be amazed.
I have spent more than half my life delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to “emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in international financial services around the world running different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to offer solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.
Labels: Leadership, Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork
posted by William Martin @ 09:02
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