The Seven Wastes | 7 Mudas

7 Wastes of Lean Manufacturing

The seven wastes of Lean Manufacturing are what we are aiming to remove from our
processes by removing the causes of Mura and Muri as well as tackling Muda directly.
But what exactly are the seven wastes of Lean Manufacturing (or 7 Mudas)?
The Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing are;

 Transport
 Inventory
 Motion
 Waiting
 Over-Processing
 Overproduction
 Defects

For a more in depth discussion of each waste including causes, examples, and potential
solutions click the links within each description.
 Remove Wastes to Reduce Costs

How to Remember the 7 Wastes

There are a couple of Simple Mnemonics that you can use to help you remember the 7
Wastes. The first is to ask your self “Who is TIM WOOD?”

TIMWOOD
1. Transport
2. Inventory
3. Motion
4. Waiting
5. Over Processing
6. Over Production
7. Defects

TimWood comes from Standard-Cooper in the UK where I first started my career as a

young Quality Engineer in the Automotive Industry. It is now probably the most
recognized way of remembering the seven wastes.
An alternative is

WORMPIT;
1. Waiting
2. Over Production
3. Rejects
4. Motion
5. Processing
6. Inventory
7. Transport

Using either TIMWOOD or WORMPIT will help you to remember your seven wastes,
very useful if you are training others and have to list them out on a board.

What Exactly is Waste?

The simplest way to describe waste is as “Something that adds no Value.” Our
customers would not be happy to pay for any action that we take that does not add
value to what they actually want and nor should we be.
Would you be happy if you received a bill in a restaurant that included a meal that was
prepared in error? No; you would argue and demand that it was removed from your bill;
yet if you buy a product in a store the price that you pay will contain costs that you
would not want to pay. Would you want to pay for the machine operators wages whilst
they sat idle waiting for a delivery, or for the rework processes that had to be
undertaken because the machine was incorrectly set, or even for storing your product
for three months before it was delivered to the store? These wastes are included within
the cost of your products, either inflating the price you pay or reducing the profit of the
company.

Why Remove Waste?

Your companies Profit is your selling price less your costs, no matter how you think
about the selling price it is very much dictated by the market not by yourself. If you
charge too much then your customers will go elsewhere, even if you charge too little
you may lose customers as they will perceive there may be something wrong with what
you are offering. Therefore the only way you have to improve your profits are to reduce
your costs; this means removing all elements of waste from your processes.
In addition to improving your profits you will find that waste has a major impact on your
customer’s satisfaction with your products and services. Your customers want on time
delivery, perfect quality and at the right price. Something that you cannot achieve if you
allow the 7 wastes to persist within your processes.

The Waste of Transport

Transport is the movement of materials from one location to another, this is a waste as
it adds zero value to the product. Transport adds no value to the product, you as a
business are paying people to move material from one location to another, a process
that only costs you money and makes nothing for you. The waste of Transport can be a
very high cost to your business, you need people to operate it and equipment such as
trucks or fork trucks to undertake this expensive movement of materials.

The Waste of Inventory

Inventory Hides Problems

Inventory costs you money, every piece of product tied up in raw material, work in
progress or finished goods has a cost and until it is actually sold that cost is yours. In
addition to the pure cost of your inventory it adds many other costs; inventory feeds
many other wastes.
Inventory has to be stored, it needs space, it needs packaging and it has to be
transported around. It has the chance of being damaged during transport and becoming
obsolete. The waste of Inventory hides many of the other wastes in your systems.

The Waste of Motion

Excessive motion of either people or a machine is a waste.

Unnecessary motions are those movements of man or machine which are not as small
or as easy to achieve as possible, by this I mean bending down to retrieve heavy
objects at floor level when they could be fed at waist level to reduce stress and time to
retrieve. Excessive travel between work stations, excessive machine movements from
start point to work start point are all examples of the waste of Motion.
All of these wasteful motions cost you time (money) and cause stress on your
employees and machines, after all even robots wear out.

The Waste of Waiting

Eliminate the waste of waiting to make your processes smoother

How often do you spend time waiting for an answer from another department in your
organization, or waiting for a delivery from a supplier or an engineer to come and fix a
machine? We tend to spend an enormous amount of time waiting for things in our
working lives (and personal lives too), this is an obvious waste.
The Waste of Waiting disrupts flow, one of the main principles of Lean Manufacturing,
as such it is one of the more serious of the seven wastes or 7 mudas of lean
manufacturing.

The waste of Overproduction

Over producing what the customer does not want now is a waste
The most serious of all of the seven wastes; the waste of overproduction is making too
much or too early. This is usually because of working with oversize batches, long lead
times, poor supplier relations and a host of other reasons. Overproduction leads to high
levels of inventory which mask many of the problems within your organization.
The aim should be to make only what is required when it is required by the customer,
the philosophy of Just in Time (JIT), however many companies work on the principle of
Just in Case!

The Waste of Over-processing

Doing More than the customer wants costs you money

The waste of Overprocessing is where we use inappropriate techniques, oversize

equipment, working to tolerances that are too tight, perform processes that are not
required by the customer and so forth. All of these things cost us time and money.
One of the biggest examples of over-processing in most companies is that of the “mega
machine” that can do an operation faster than any other, but every process flow has to
be routed through it causing scheduling complications, delays and so forth. In lean;
small is beautiful, use small appropriate machines where they are needed in the flow,
not break the flow to route through a highly expensive monstrosity that the accountants
insist is kept busy!

The Waste of Defects

Defects hide many other problems and wastes

The most obvious of the seven wastes, although not always the easiest to detect before
they reach your customers. Quality errors that cause defects invariably cost you far
more than you expect. Every defective item requires rework or replacement, it wastes
resources and materials, it creates paperwork, it can lead to lost customers.
The Waste of Defects should be prevented where possible, better to prevent than to try
to detect them, implementation of pokayoke systems and autonomation can help to
prevent defects from occurring.

Additional wastes
Waste of Talent; failing to make use of the people within your organization. This is an
issue that many of our companies in the West fail to address. We still tend to operate
within a command and control environment and take little real notice of what our
employees really think and what they can contribute. Your employees are your greatest
asset by far and can help you to drive out many of the other wastes.
Waste of resources; failure to make efficient use of electricity, gas, water. Not only does
this waste cost you money it is also a burden on our environment and society as a
whole.
Wasted materials; too often off-cuts and other byproducts are just sent to landfill rather
than being utilized elsewhere.

Eliminating the Seven Wastes

Eliminating the seven wastes is something that can be done through the implementation
of Lean and the various lean tools, however the focus of your implementation should not
be to identify and remove waste. Instead you should use the principles of lean
manufacturing to identify value according to the customer and make those value adding
processes flow through your organization at the pull of the customer. This approach
helps you to make your value adding processes more efficient and causes the waste to
literally “dissolve.”
Approaching lean from a perspective of removing the 7 wastes rather than making value
flow however usually ends up with us making non-value adding processes more
efficient and we get better and better at doing things that the customer does not want.
To eliminate the 7 wastes of lean we have to focus on the lean principles and value as
perceived by our customers.

The Seven Wastes of Lean

Manufacturing and Their Impacts on
the Environment
Lean manufacturing, a management philosophy primarily derived from the Toyota
Production System, focuses on eliminating waste—called “Muda”— within a
manufacturing system. It takes into account many kinds of waste, including the waste of
excessive human motion, and aims to integrate each step of production into a holistic,
efficient process that reduces cost and improves overall revenue. Under the lean
manufacturing system, seven wastes are identified: overproduction, inventory, motion,
defects, over-processing, waiting, and transport.

Overproduction
The most serious of the wastes, overproduction can cause all other types of wastes and
results in excess inventory. Stocking too much of a product that goes unused has
obvious costs: storage, wasted materials, and excessive capital tied up in useless
inventory.

Depending, of course, on the product in question, overproduction can have very serious
environmental effects. More raw materials than necessary are consumed; the product
may spoil or become obsolete, which requires that it be tossed; and, if the product
involves hazardous materials, more hazardous materials than necessary are wasted,
resulting in extra emissions, extra costs of waste disposal, possible worker exposure,
and potential environmental problems resulting from the waste itself.

Inventory
Inventory waste refers to the waste produced by unprocessed inventory. This includes
the waste of storage, the waste of capital tied up in unprocessed inventory, the waste of
transporting the inventory, the containers used to hold inventory, the lighting of the
storage space, etc. Moreover, having excess inventory can hide the original wastes of
producing said inventory.

The environmental impacts of inventory waste are packaging, deterioration or damage

to work-in-process, additional materials to replace damaged or obsolete inventory, and
the energy to light—as well as either heat or cool—inventory space.

Motion
Wasteful motion is all of the motion, whether by a person or a machine, that could be
minimized. If excess motion is used to add value that could have been added by less,
than that margin of motion is wasted. Motion could refer to anything from a worker
bending over to pick something up on the factory floor to additional wear and tear on
machines, resulting in capital depreciation that must be replaced.

There are many environmental costs from excess motion. One obvious one is the
needless waste of materials used to replace worn machines; another one could be the
health resources for overburdened employees, who might not have needed them if
motion had been minimized.

Defects
Defects refer to a product deviating from the standards of its design or from the
customer’s expectation. Defective products must be replaced; they require paperwork
and human labor to process it; they might potentially lose customers; the resources put
into the defective product are wasted because the product is not used. Moreover, a
defective product implies waste at other levels that may have led to the defect to begin
with; making a more efficient production system reduces defects and increases the
resources needed to address them in the first place.

Environmental costs of defects are the raw materials consumed, the defective parts of
the product requiring disposal or recycling (which wastes other resources involved in
repurposing it), and the extra space required and increased energy use involved in
dealing with the defects.

Over-processing
Over-processing refers to any component of the process of manufacture that is
unnecessary. Painting an area that will never be seen or adding features that will not be
used are examples of over-processing. Essentially, it refers to adding more value than
the customer requires.

The environmental impact involves the excess of parts, labor, and raw materials
consumed in production. Time, energy, and emissions are wasted when they are used
to produce something that is unnecessary in a product; simplification and efficiency
reduce these wastes and benefit the company and the environment.

Waiting
Waiting refers to wasted time because of slowed or halted production in one step of the
production chain while a previous step is completed. To take the classic example, the
production line, if one task along the chain takes longer than another, than any time the
employee in charge of the next task spends waiting is wasted. The task that takes more
time must be made more efficient, other employees must be hired to help, or the
workflow must be better coordinated or scheduled in order to make up for this wasted
time.
The environmental impact comes from the wasted labor and energy from lighting,
heating, or cooling during the waiting period. Additionally, material can be spoiled, and
components could be damaged because of an inefficient workflow.

Transport
Transport is moving materials from one position to another. The transport itself adds no
value to the product, so minimizing these costs is essential. This means having one
plant closer to another in the production chain, or minimizing the costs of transportation
using more efficient methods. Resources and time are used in handling material,
employing staff to operate transportation, training, implement safety precautions, and
using extra space. Transport can also cause the waste of waiting, as one part of the
production chain must wait for material to arrive.

Environmental costs to waiting include gas emissions, transportation packaging used,

possible damage to the product en route, as well as a whole host of other wastes
involving transporting hazardous materials.