Waste Doesn’t Happen by Accident

In some situations, waste (activity that DOESN’T add value) is the result of something going wrong. For example, when a defect occurs, it starts a chain of waste activities:

  • wait while a decision is made to rework or re-make the workpiece
  • transport the workpiece to a repair/re-build location
  • motion waste to repair or re-build the item
  • transport the workpiece back to where it needs to go
  • etc.

Waste resulting from defects or other problems is usually obvious. If we solve the problem–especially at the root cause–it reduces waste and improves our productivity. This is a good thing.

What’s less obvious is waste steps that are BUILT IN to our current processes. For example, if our tools are stored two steps away from where we do our work, those two steps are waste every time we get (or put away) a tool.

A key way to improve our productivity is to break down our processes into small steps. Then we evaluate which steps are waste. We make changes in our process to reduce (or eliminate) the waste steps. In the example above, we could re-arrange the work-area so that tools are closer to where we use them. We could even keep commonly-used tools in a tool belt or apron. Simple improvements like this decrease the time it takes us to do the process. They raise our productivity without us having to work any harder. Plus, when we improve our daily process, it makes a difference EVERY time we do our job–not just for the occasional defect. We’ve used our brain-power and creativity to make our regular work better.

The Lean business culture includes this assumption that’s almost always true: our processes are FILLED with waste steps that are built-in. We can almost always find multiple improvements. Here are two “juicy” quotes that capture this assumption:

“Waste doesn’t happen by accident: it’s created by the methods used to organize operations.” 
The Lean Strategy by Michael Balle, Daniel Jones, Jacques Chaize, and Orest Fiume (McGraw Hill, 2017) p. 47.

“As they say at Toyota, ‘The shop floor is a reflection of management.'”
Toyota Kata by Mike Rother (McGraw Hill, 2010) p. 37.

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