Muhammad Mubashir Ghori

The concept of the "7 Wastes" in Lean Manufacturing is foundational to the Lean philosophy, which aims to increase efficiency by identifying and eliminating waste. The list categorizes different forms of waste that do not add value to the product. Here’s a brief overview of the 7 Wastes, with a focus on the waste of transportation: 1. Overproduction Producing more than what is needed, or producing items before they are required, leads to excess inventory, increased storage costs, and wasted resources. 2. Inventory Having more inventory than necessary ties up capital and can lead to obsolescence, increased storage costs, and potential damage to goods. 3. Motion Excessive movement by workers, such as walking or reaching for materials, which does not add value to the process. Streamlined work processes can reduce unnecessary movements. 4. Waiting Time spent waiting for materials, equipment, or information. This waste can slow down the production process and lead to inefficien...

The  waste of Over-processing  is where we use inappropriate techniques, oversize equipment, working to tolerances that are too tight, perform processes that are not required by the customer and so forth. All of these things cost us time and money. One of the biggest examples of over-processing in most companies is that of the “mega machine” that can do an operation faster than any other, but every process flow has to be routed through it causing scheduling complications, delays and so forth. In lean; small is beautiful, use small appropriate machines where they are needed in the flow, not break the flow to route through a highly expensive monstrosity that the accountants insist is kept busy! Waste of inappropriate processing is a consequence of a poorly planned production process of the product. The product does not satisfy requirements and has to be reworked; sometimes it is even useless. The reasons for waste of inappropriate processing can be found by using ...

Transport is the movement of materials from one location to another, this is a waste as it adds zero value to the product. Why would your customer (or you for that matter) want to pay for an operation that adds no value? Transport adds no value to the product, you as a business are paying people to move material from one location to another, a process that only costs you money and makes nothing for you. The waste of Transport can be a very high cost to your business, you need people to operate it and equipment such as trucks or fork trucks to undertake this expensive movement of materials. Waste of transport is a consequence of excessively long, intersecting transport paths, temporary storage, load and unload, transport of pallets hither and thither. Waste of transport is also caused by too detailed process breakdown and exaggerated division of work, due to imprecisely defined intermediate warehouses and due to production in large series.  Waste of tra...

Inventory costs you money, every piece of product tied up in raw material, work in progress or finished goods has a cost and until it is actually sold that cost is yours. In addition to the pure cost of your inventory it adds many other costs; inventory feeds many other wastes. Inventory has to be stored, it needs space, it needs packaging and it has to be transported around. It has the chance of being damaged during transport and becoming obsolete. The  waste of Inventory  hides many of the other wastes in your systems. Waste of unnecessary inventory is similar to the waste of overproduction. Just like overproduction, supply of too large quantities leads to the waste of unnecessary inventory. Costs upon exit from the warehouse consist of costs for purchasing material and products, order-launch costs and inventory costs. High costs are therefore related to storage and they can amount up to 20% of the product sales value. Waste of unnecessary inventory can be minimized by ...

Unnecessary motions are those movements of man or machine which are not as small or as easy to achieve as possible, by this I mean bending down to retrieve heavy objects at floor level when they could be fed at waist level to reduce stress and time to retrieve. Excessive travel between work stations, excessive machine movements from start point to work start point are all examples of the  waste of Motion . All of these wasteful motions cost you time (money) and cause stress on your employees and machines, after all even robots wear out. Waste of unnecessary motion is clearly visible when holding and depositing products. Workers sit by the conveyor belts and put together parts in order to make the final product. The main element of the assembly line is a conveyor belt, so the waste consists of reaching and depositing. The main reason for waste of unnecessary motion is the sitting work of workers, which reduces workers' moving area and eliminates mutual help of workers. Waste a...

Waste of manufacturing defects appears on locations where semi-manufactured products accumulate and therefore intermediate storage is required.  It is possible to eliminate waste of manufacturing defects by training workers to control the workplace, product and circumstances:  The worker who manufactures a particular part should have the possibility of supervision how this particular part was manufactured at his predecessor.  The worker who has just finished a particular part should check it immediately. The worker who has finished a particular part should also build it in in his workplace.  

Overproduction occurs if more products are manufactured than it was planned by the production plan, or if products are manufactured faster that it was planned. Consequences are piles of too early deposited products in intermediate warehouses. In order to prevent that a worker on a machine in a production line would not be without work, he starts processing the next operational order immediately after having finished the previous one. This new product was planned to be manufactured later, so the worker creates overproduction, which requires intermediate warehouses. The company should have a good overview of overproduction, so it has to organize the work in such a way the overproduction is clearly visible. Overproduction can be eliminated by informing and convincing the workers that they have to stop working the moment when the daily production plan has been achieved. It is better that workers do not work than that they do something that they do not need.

There are a couple of Simple Mnemonics that you can use to help you remember the 7 Wastes. The first is to ask your self “Who is TIM WOOD?” TIMWOOD T ransport I nventory M otion W aiting O ver Processing O ver Production D efects An alternative is WORMPIT ; W aiting O ver Production R ejects M otion P rocessing I nventory T ransport Using either TIMWOOD or WORMPIT will help you to remember your seven wastes, very useful if you are training others and have to list them out on a board.

After World War II, Japanese manufacturers were faced with the dilemma of vast shortages of material, financial, and human resources. These conditions resulted in the birth of lean manufacturing concept. Toyota motor company, led by its president (Toyota), recognized that American automakers of the era were out-producing their Japanese counterparts; in the mid 1940’s American companies were outperforming their Japanese counterparts by a factor of ten. In order to make a move toward improvement early, Japanese leaders, such as, Shigeo Shingo and Taiichi Ohno, devised a new, disciplined, process-oriented system, which is known today as “Toyota Production System” or “Lean Manufacturing” (Abdullah, 2003). Taiichi Ohno, who was given the task of developing a system that would enhance productivity at Toyota, is generally considered to be the primary force behind its system. After some experimentation, the Toyota production system was developed and refined between 1945 and 1970, and is s...