The seven wastes are a well established tool often used in Lean Manufacturing which help identify areas within a business which can be improved.<\/p>\n
The seven wastes are a lean tool and are aligned to the principles of value a within process. In lean, processes are configured so that they include only activities that add value to the item and ultimately to the customer \u2013 with everything else seen as waste.<\/p>\n
There are two forms of waste \u2013 firstly there is necessary waste \u2013 whereby the activity does not add value to the end product but is necessary for the process to function \u2013 secondly there is waste which can be irradiated (which can improve either cost or lead time as a result)<\/p>\n
The key thing to remember about the seven wastes is that they do not just apply to manufacturing in fact they are very much relevant to supply chain or any process for that matter.<\/p>\n
What are the seven wastes and how do they apply to Supply Chain?<\/p>\n
1 \u2013 Overproduction<\/p>\n
Over production refers to making too many of something – more than is required to satisfy the end customer at that point in time.<\/p>\n
2 \u2013 Waiting<\/p>\n
Waiting is queue time \u2013 how often does one activity stop with the process owner having to wait to commence the next step \u2013 think of a pile of requisitions that a buyer might be reviewing \u2013 you will take your requisition but will have to wait until they have reviewed the ones ahead of you in the work queue.<\/p>\n
3 \u2013 Transporting<\/p>\n
Moving products from location to location does not add value \u2013 it requires the use of resources and results in cost and lead time increases. This can equally apply to documents being moved around a building during their process as it does relating to the physical shipment of goods and materials.<\/p>\n
4 \u2013 Inappropriate processing<\/p>\n
Doing more work than in necessary \u2013 for example \u2013 do you really need to go out to quote to 20 different suppliers or will just 2 suppliers do? What about the 10 different approval signatories required on a simple purchase order?<\/p>\n
5 \u2013 Unnecessary inventory<\/p>\n
Excess inventory can be a substantial costs to many organizations tying up valuable resources and creating wasteful extra processing.<\/p>\n
6 \u2013 Excess motion<\/p>\n
Lean attempts to simply processes by providing everything that the worker needs situated within or close by their workstation \u2013 consider the office worker where the printer is all the way over the other side of the office and time is wasted in walking to and from the device during the day.<\/p>\n
7 \u2013 Defects<\/p>\n
Lean aims to make the perfect product every time \u2013 defects are considered waste \u2013 this is easy to envisage in a manufacturing environment where an assembly line is churning out product but perhaps less so were services are provided. However many examples abound \u2013 consider a report that is produced with errors on it that has to be reworked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The seven wastes are a well established tool often used in Lean Manufacturing which help identify areas within a business which can be improved. The seven wastes are a lean tool and are aligned to the principles of value a within process. In lean, processes are configured so that they include only activities that add […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-management"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Ittq-1d","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76,"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/76"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/supplychain-mechanic.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}