SQPS Ltd.

The Waste Series: Waiting

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time_runningWaiting can take many forms in different organizations – and can add up quickly – making it a significant form of waste. In its simplest form, one production station could be idle and waiting to receive parts from an upstream operation. Other forms may be related to support  and information flow processes and are just as important to study. Consider the following examples:

  • Production is waiting on maintenance to fix a piece of equipment
  • Maintenance is waiting for a critical part
  • Shipping dock operator is waiting for paperwork to be completed before shipment can leave
  • Operator can’t access portal to generate advance shipping notice (ASN) with customer
  • Team is waiting for the CEO before they can start a meeting
  • Electric forklift truck is in charging station and not available to move material
  • Buyer is waiting for signatures to approve a new supplier or subcontractor

Understanding and eliminating this form of waste can have a big impact on reducing the lead time and creating more capacity. For support processes, freeing up people’s time can be helpful in utilizing skills on important issues. Ultimately this will lead to improved customer satisfaction and increased profitability.

The Waste Series: Overproduction

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What does “overproduction” mean? dreamstime_5669182

In Wikipedia it refers to the “excess of supply over demand of products being offered to the market.” In other words, producing more (product) than what the customer  wants or needs.

Questions:
– What if a company is producing based on forecasts?
– What about service-based organizations? is there such a thing as “overproduction”?

To answer the first question, we need to evaluate the impact of overproduction. While overproduction keeps equipment and employees busy (to satisfy utilization metrics) on one hand, it generates other types of waste such as:

  • Inventory – If it’s not going to the customer, it has to sit somewhere!
  • Transport – There is more transport activities if the product has to be stored and retrieved
  • Correction – If a defect is detected, more product must be investigated and corrected to ensure conformance.

So even if it’s based on forecasts, it is still generating other types of waste with  no firm orders from the customer!

What about internal customers (like producing components for the next process, etc)? Same answer. Check against the list above.

The second question can be answered by first defining modes of overproduction:

  • Generating more information than needed (we’re all familiar with this!): Sending emails to everyone unnecessarily, generating reports no one needs, unnecessary data collection, etc. – all of this results in tying up people’s time in wasteful activities, including meetings, to discuss them. Remember the question that we need to answer,  Is there any value to the client or improvement to the process from doing this?
  • Building potential value streams or capacities no one will use: If management puts in place facilities for potential services that stay idle for any reason, this may result in waste of resources (human resources, maintenance, etc)

About Our Company

Since 1997, SQPS Ltd. has been providing customized solutions in Lean & Quality systems to our clients in both the manufacturing and service sectors. Contact us today