Waste of Transportation, 7 Wastes in Lean Manufacturing (SIX Sigma)

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 transport can be eliminated by optimizing transport paths, by defining exact locations and numbers of intermediate warehouses and by a transition from large-series to small-series or even individual production.