Lesson 1 Introduction - What are the 7 wastes and what are

they all about?

Overview of the course

The course is made up of a series of 7 short lessons.

Lesson 1 Introduction
Lesson 2 The Seven Wastes – Defects and transportation
Lesson 3 The Seven Wastes – Transportation, Waiting and Inventory
Lesson 4 The Seven Wastes – Motion and Over Processing
Lesson 5 The Visual Workplace
Lesson 6 Standing in the Circle
Lesson 7 Tim Wood - Always Remember

About this lesson – Lesson 1 - Introduction

The main purpose of this lesson is to give you an insight into ‘The 7 wastes’, what they are
and why an ability to recognise them is so important.

Types of waste

Waste in various forms exists in everything we do, even our everyday lives. The workplace is
no different. In fact for most processes the level of waste is much higher than most people
think. On average around 95% of any process will be waste of one form or another. Difficult to
believe? It's true………..

Within the Toyota production system, 3 types of waste are considered.

MUDA is defined as any activity that does not add value to the process.

MURI is defined as ‘unevenness’. When a process is not balanced for example

MURA is defined as ‘overburden’ or unreasonableness. Typically when a process cannot

cope with the work demand

In this short course we will be concentrating on MUDA and the seven

categories of waste that exist within the concept of MUDA

© Kaizentrainer.co.uk 2009
What are the seven wastes?

The wastes we are going to look at over this short course are split into 7 categories
which are:

• Defects

• Over production

• Transportation

• Waiting

• Inventory

• Motion

• Over processing

Defects – stop the customer receiving the work on time. Normally, because of this, additional
processes are put in place to manage the situation. All of these, because they are additional,
are waste

Over Production – This is simply when we produce more that the customer requires. We
have to store it, which is unnecessary.

Transportation – Every time a product it transported it is a waste.The risk of damage and

loss increases together with the costs.

Waiting – This can be true for both people and product. Waiting costs money!

Inventory – The cost of materials, storage and management of the materials again costs
money.

Motion – This refers to the operator or the machine. Time in motion without actually adding
value is waste.

Over Processing – Quite often additional work is added to the process that the customer
does not require. This adds time and hence cost.

The first Steps

Before we can start to examine the various types of waste we need to be able to recognise it.
To do this we need to understand the concept of Value Added and Non Value Added
activities, sometimes referred to as VA and NVA

Value Added is defined as any activity that transforms a product closer to what the customer
requires. You can look at this in a simple way. If you were the customer would you pay for the

© Kaizentrainer.co.uk 2009
activity? So for example would you pay for a component to be shipped 100 miles from one
plant to another?

Non Value Added is the opposite. It is defined as a process or activity that does not
transform the product closer to the customer requirement.
You need to think a little sometimes. What about rework for example? Rework only takes
place because of an error in the first place. So rework is NVA.

In conclusion

Hopefully you now understand the basic concepts of the 7 wastes and the difference between
Value added and Non value added activities.

In the next lesson we will take you through the first 2 categories, Defects, and
Overproduction in a little more detail

Best regards,

Graham Ross and Barry Jeffrey for Kaizentrainer

© Kaizentrainer.co.uk 2009