Lean Waste and Key Steps for Eliminating Them

Lean Wastes and Key Steps for Eliminating Them

The concept of waste in lean is quite different from the general description of it. In lean manufacturing, waste is any item or endeavor that is spent but that does not contribute to the conversion of raw materials into the product that the consumer is paying for. Waste, according to lean, is not just solid, fluid, emissions, or releases; it can be anything else including inventory, skills, unneeded motion and others which do not add values to the final product and are just not needed by the customer.

Therefore, we can safely conclude that waste, according to lean management is more of a non-tangible cost which the company is bearing, without adding values to the customers and are not being paid for by them.

Lean thinking focuses on wastes from work processes. In simple terms, from lean perspective, waste is any measure or step in a process that does not add values to the end-customer.

There are three (3) broad categories of waste in lean management – mura, muri and muda:

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Mura

Mura also refers to unevenness, waste due to fluctuated demands. For instance; in a particular month there was a high demand of a particular product and in the month that followed there was no demand, but due to bull-whip effect the organization has produced a lot considering that there will be demand in the subsequent months as well. However, due to decreased demand there was unneeded stock or inventory that needed to be cared of. The company needs to bear the cost. That is waste.

Muri

Muri could also be called overburdening; it is one of the three categories of waste. Working too much at a particular point in time with idleness at other point, amounts to imbalance in the use of time, resources and/or energy. This can also apply to employees or machinery. For instance, a group of employees are overburdened on a particular task and another group of employee under-utilized at the same period of time.

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Muda

Muda also means the in-process waste. It is the biggest and most popular concept of Lean waste. It is the conventional target of “process improvement,” for instance having ten different steps in a company's process when simply four steps are actually required. This kind of waste is further classified as TIMWOODS, which represents waste in Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects and Skills.

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