Muda is the direct obstacle of flow. There are 7 distinctive types of Muda which all lead to waiting times, and therefore longer lead times in a process. Simply taking out the Muda does not work. Usually, there is a reason why the Muda is there and this reason often has to do with the other two enemies: Muri and Mura.  This means there are three enemies of lean and they are interrelated, and should therefore be considered simultaneously. Instead of just looking at the traditional 7 wastes of Muda, it is incumbent to consider instead the three categories of waste used by TPS (Toyota Production System).

Take a few moments and watch this educational video.

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Waste is any step or action in a process that is not required to complete a process successfully. When waste is removed, only the steps that are required to deliver a satisfactory product or service to the customer remain in the process. 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.

Identifying and Eliminating Waste

The purpose of Lean manufacturing is to find and eliminate muda, mura, and muri, in order to improve quality, safety, and efficiency. The best way to identify these types of waste are to understand what they are:

1. Muda – These activities don’t add value. They do not help your organization or your workers in any way. Overproduction, over processing, inventory, transportation, motion, waiting and defects. If you want to reduce costs, finding and eliminating muda is essential.

2. Mura – This type of waste is caused by the unevenness in services or production. When standards are non-existent or not followed, mura occurs. This shows up as variation, or times when work is overloaded, and other times when nothing is going on. The goal is to make the work more consistent and predictable as much as possible, so the resources can be properly aligned. This will also reduce the next type, Muri.

3. Muri – This is the result of processes that are excessively difficult or overburdening for employees. When there is a lack of training, no standards established, or they are trying to use the wrong tool for the job, Muri can occur. Think about a machine that is running all the time, and there is no time to stop and perform maintenance. Think about that employee who continually works overtime, and the stress of the job will end up making them sick, or they will quit. Neither the employee or the machine can continue at that pace, and when they break, things will get really bad. If you identify Muri in your process, it is recommended to work on those wastes first!

Muda, mura and muri can be eliminated or signifcantly reduced if you implement various lean tools and principles. Don’t just rush in to try and highlight and remove the muda in the hope of making a quick impression. Those changes will be short lived successes. Without tackling mura and muri, you will find muda returning to challenge you.

Using the 5s Tool for Success

One Lean tool that can help you eliminate these forms of waste is the 5S system. 5S helps to declutter, clean, and organize the workplace using the five S principles: sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain. It is a systematic and methodical approach allowing teams to organize their workplace in the safest and most efficient manner.

Download the free 5S and Visual Factory 45-page training packet >>>

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What Is Mura?

Mura refers to an unevenness in the distribution of workload in an organization. A production process is a chain of linked events that rely on one another, and it’s important to ensure that every component of that process is tasked with a burden that they can handle.

However, it’s just as important to ensure that nobody is delegating or propagating tasks that end up causing bottlenecks down the line. The goal is to avoid having too much work, and not enough work.

How mura affects organizations

For example, a company that works on a rigid reporting structure and has specific requirements towards its higher-ranking employees at the ends of certain periods (e.g. every month) may see mura creeping in. If a manager or director is worried about meeting their own quota, they could create additional burden for their direct reports, leading to a decreased productivity for the whole department.

That additional burden muri  can have a significant impact on the production chain as a whole, and it’s one of the key types of waste that are to be avoided. In a situation of being overburdened, employees will lower their productivity or morale (or both), sometimes leading to permanent changes in the process that compound in the long run. We see this in an excessive amount of work at the end of a month or end of quarter, then the following week is really slow with little work to complete.

In an organization that has minimal mura, it would be hard to determine when the end of the month occurs, as each day would look similar to the other.

Things you can do to combat mura

Reducing mura starts by assessing the productivity and output of each link in the production chain, and determining the average working pace of the different components involved. The key is to minimize the need for additional buffers between each tasks, while also ensuring that no component in the chain is ever starved of resources.

In the first case unevenness on the side of overproduction the organization will suffer from the additional waste created that has to be accounted for until it can be properly dispatched to the next node in the chain.

This creates the need for additional storage and efforts by the organization to maintain that storage. This can be particularly problematic if the unevenness results in a brief spike in production, in which case the additional storage/buffer facilities created may turn out to be completely unnecessary a short time later.

On the other hand, resource starvation can lead to employees rushing their work and feeling overburdened. This, in turn, can cause them to pay less attention to their primary tasks. Depending on the situation, this may not actually manifest itself as a problem immediately, but it can be just as problematic later on.

The common final result is that some parts of the organization are behind their main schedule, as they’ve been trying to keep up with auxiliary tasks handed down from above to achieve goals and financial outcomes.

The importance of dealing with mura on a fundamental level

The reporting structure and requirements of an organization can have the biggest impact on the way mura is handled. Employees at all levels must be given tasks that correspond with their current situation and ability to handle workload, and the analysis should seek to trim requirements that turn out to work against productivity in the long run.

An example of this is the requirement for a sales manager to meet a certain quota at the end of their current cycle, which, as we described above, often results in additional pressure for everyone on their team (but that pressure is felt particularly strongly by those lower down in the ranks).

However, given the nature of a sales department, and the modern tools available for measuring the performance of an organizational component of this type, removing those requirements is often easier said than done.

This is why mura is so difficult to deal with once it’s managed to creep into an organization’s channels, and why it’s so important to deal with it properly from the very beginning, when laying the foundations of those channels.

Balancing mura reduction with the organization’s performance

When it comes to production for the market, the requirements for the organization are often set by the current market trends and customer demands. This can make it tricky to develop a production process that reduces mura from the start, as the organization may have limited access to information at first.

In that case, the development of each component of the process should be done under the assumption that it will face the minimal possible demand. If it turns out that one of the components is frequently being tasked with more work, only then should additional resources be allocated to accommodate for that. An example of this is creating additional buffers and modifying the production chain to account for increased output from this step.

Conclusion

It’s not rare that an organization would discover that they need to fundamentally reevaluate their attitude towards things like accounting and sales measurement in order to properly get rid of mura. But in the long run, it’s one of the most productive steps that can be taken to ensure the smoothness of the working process, and to minimize the waste created by an uneven allocation of tasks and resources. Eliminating mura, along with muri, can make it much easier to deal with muda later on.

The best approach in dealing with mura is therefore to preemptively introduce measures against it in the fundamental structure of the organization. With a proper foundation, building the rest of the process can be handled much more easily.

Check out our other article, “What is Mura, Muri, Muda?“

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What Is Muri?

When looking at the problems in a production process, it’s often important to realize the root cause behind each actual obstruction. If mura (unevenness) is noticeable in the process, it could be caused by an improper allocation of the working resources.

Sometimes resolving the problem comes down to making sure that everyone is tasked with the exact amount of work that they can realistically handle, but as it often turns out, it’s not that simple to pinpoint the right spot.

Muri refers to the waste of overburden, which is a well-known contributing factor in decreased productivity and employee morale across the board. The tightly interconnected nature of most production processes often means that a single employee or machine failing to fulfill their obligations on-time can quickly propagate further down the line. This, in turn, causes issues for others and ultimately the end customer in the form of defects or late deliveries.

How does muri manifest itself in reality?

A simple example of muri is an employee given deadlines that are constantly too short for their own skill level. The employee may either fail to complete the task on time, leading to delays for everyone in his chain of operation, or they may alternatively rush their work in order to fit within the tight constraints.

The latter option is no more attractive than the first one, as it leads to reduced workplace safety and employee morale. These factors inevitably manifest as either a reduction in the production quality, or an additional reduction in that employee’s working pace.

To identify muri, look for employees acting overwhelmed or stressed out, machines constantly running around the clock, or frustration and anger expressed between workers.

Dealing with muri efficiently

Addressing muri can be a complicated ordeal, depending on the circumstances. On a general level, it mostly comes down to properly identifying the discrete components of each given task, and analyzing those components on a basic level to understand their true requirements.

After the task has been broken down and minimized into separate parts, it’s much easier to spot potential bottlenecks, and ways to optimize the production flow. Additionally, this kind of analysis can help identify problems with standardization, which are another main cause of muri in the production process.

If one node of the chain receives components in a non-standard form, they will have to spend extra time and effort bringing them to a condition they can work on. Ensuring that the output of each step of the process is consistent with some common organizational standards plays a critical role in the reduction of muri.

The same rule applies for components which eventually make their way to external facilities as well. Muri does not only occur within a given organization, but can manifest itself in places where the company is sending its own products (or parts of them) to another facility for further processing. In the office, this might show up when sending out work to be completed by service providers. In those cases, the increased challenge in communication can make problems caused by muri even more serious.

Putting the analyzed and modified parts back together should then result in improved performance in every step of the process, and subsequently in elevated employee morale and output.

Avoid swinging too far in one direction

It’s important to realize the danger of overcompensating for muri, which can lead to a different class of problems. If employees are given too much leeway in completing their tasks, they might be wasting their resources. This is one of the fundamental types of waste that we’re trying to avoid in the first place, requiring a careful analysis of the fundamental components of the production chain.

Finding the perfect balance to completely eliminate muri may not happen on the first try, and it might need a few iterations of the decomposition/analysis process, depending on the overall complexity of the production chain.

Analysis of all relevant data is critical

Properly recording the results of the analysis and modification steps, as well as measuring the differences in output after each iteration, are the key components to ensuring that muri reduction is applied properly, and that the changes are in the right direction.

When the task is carried out by a machine, it’s often much easier to get an accurate measurement of the changes in its output. But when it comes to people, a more hands-down approach is often needed in order to ensure that the organization is given an accurate representation of the changes in productivity. Employees should be allowed to provide their own input in this case, instead of observing them through external measurement tools exclusively.

Conclusion

If muri reduction is applied properly from the very start of designing a production process, it can result in a very lean process that is also easily extendable in the future. When a new component has to be added to the production chain, this can be done much more easily when the currently produced output is already in a standardized form, and doesn’t require any special changes to accommodate the new addition.

On the other hand, the introduction of the new component can be streamlined as well, instead of requiring it to be adapted to inputs with different parameters.

Check out our other article, “What is Mura, Muri, Muda?“

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