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Home » Blogs » Management & Strategy » The '7 Deadly Wastes' to Eliminate in Your Company
Jenel Stelton-Holtmeier

The '7 Deadly Wastes' to Eliminate in Your Company

By    Jenel  Stelton-Holtmeier 
March 8, 2011
More about:  Distribution Operations Strategy,  MDM Blog
Adding more resources without evaluating processes can add unnecessary waste.
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If you're a good company, you're probably trying to figure out how to increase your output right about now. And while that is an appropriate goal, making sure you're not just adding more waste is important, according to Chuck Emery, founder of Lean Quest.

Work is broken into three categories: value-added, incidental work and waste, Emery said in a recent MDM webcast, Lean for Distributors: Improve process, eliminate waste. Adding more resources without evaluating your processes adds more of all three types of work – and who wants more waste?

In order to attack the waste, you have to define the waste, he says. And most waste falls into one of seven categories Emery calls the "Seven Deadly Wastes:"

  1. Rework/Errors: "This is what we call the waste because it's what we see," Emery says. "But the root cause is almost always a poor quality effort somewhere back in the chain."
  2. Over-production: Why are you producing what's not needed?
  3. Inventory: Any time you have inventory sitting around in piles, that's waste – and may be a sign of over-production or a breakdown somewhere else in the chain.
  4. Motion, the movement of the people to do the work: the less movement necessary, the more efficient the process.
  5. Material movement, the physical movement of product through your organization: "Any movement that is farther than it needs to be, whether it's being moved by forklift or conveyer, is just waste," Emery says. For example, does the package go past the same point more than once in processing? Could you reorganize your work flow to eliminate that?
  6. Over-processing: It's all well and good that you want to provide more service for your customers, but when you get down to it, is it necessary to provide your customer with things they don't need?
  7. Waiting: If you have people consistently waiting on machines, or waiting on other people in the chain, or waiting on anything, there's an opportunity to improve the process.

Attacking and eliminating the "Seven Deadly Wastes" allows any additional resources to go where it best serves your company and customers: value-added work, Emery says.

Hear Emery in the MDM Webcast, Lean for Distributors: Improve process, eliminate waste.

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