Sources of Waste: Continuous Improvement and Safety In a series of seven blogs, we briefly discussed each source of waste of the lean manufacturing or Muda (無駄, a Japanese word meaning “wastefulness; uselessness”) methodologies, namely: defects, inventory,...
Sources of Waste: Overproduction Like we established in our previously published blogs on continuous improvement and lean management or Muda (無駄), the latter a Japanese word meaning “wastefulness; uselessness”; it is easier to define the different sources of waste as...
Sources of Waste: Transport Any transport or movement of a product or material without added value is considered a source of waste among the seven specified in lean manufacturing or Muda (無駄), the latter a Japanese word meaning “wastefulness; uselessness”. Although...
Sources of Waste: Waiting Waiting is one of the seven sources of waste considered in lean manufacturing or Muda (無駄), the latter a Japanese word meaning “wastefulness; uselessness”. It is the “act” of doing nothing or working slowly while waiting for a previous step...
Sources of Waste: Overprocessing Overprocessing is one of the seven sources of waste considered in lean manufacturing or Muda (無駄), the latter a Japanese word meaning “wastefulness; uselessness”. Overprocessing could be defined as adding more value to a product than...
Sources of Waste: Inventory Waste caused by unnecessary inventory should be eliminated for two main reasons. The first and most obvious to any operations manager is that holding unnecessary inventory locks up money in materials and parts, which has direct and indirect...
