The Goal:
Identify work areas where money can be saved by cutting costs or expenses.
The Tool:
Copious amounts of waste can occur in the workplace, and in any process; but do you know what the eight most commons wastes are and how they impact your organization?
Taiichi Ohno, considered the father of Toyota Production System, created a lean manufacturing framework, which was based on the idea of preserving (or increasing) value with less work. Anything that doesn’t increase value in the eye of the customer must be considered waste, or “Muda”, and every effort should be made to eliminate that waste. The following 8 lean manufacturing wastes, mostly derived from the TPS, have a universal application to businesses today. The acronym for the eight wastes is DOWNTIME. Downtime stands for:
Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Not utilizing talent, Transportation, Inventory excess, Motion waste, Excess processing
Are you experiencing any of those?
There are many well-known techniques you can adopt; such as Six Sigma, Lean, Process Management and the Scientific Method. In addition, it is important to include the basic fundamentals of other key disciplines such as Change Management and Project Management. Find that comprehensive approach that can be tailored to the needs and culture of your organization and that will help you to manage and improve business processes to deliver exceptional customer experiences and achieve improved performance. Pay attention to the key elements:
- Focus on end-to-end business processes – workflow across functional organizations – deliver value to customers
- Focus on improved use of data – graphical displays of data – understand and react appropriately to variation
- Focus on continual improvement – targeted at true causal analysis – sustainable improvement
