To create a seamless flow of value that goes all the way to the customer without interruption, waste needs to be reduced. This brings as to an enemy that causes waste in organizational processes, and it goes by the acronym TIMWOODS. Each letter in TIMWOODS represents a type of waste (they are also known as the eight wastes of Lean Six Sigma).

Keep on reading to find out what each of those letters means.

1. Transportation

When products, equipment, inventory, tools and people move further than they need to, you have Transportation waste. Defects and damage to products can happen when materials travel unnecessary distances. Furthermore, exhaustion, accelerated wear and tear and needless work can happen when equipment and people are moved unnecessarily. Transportation also requires packaging to protect items, and can require fuel to transport the items. The transportation time is not improving the value of the item, so it takes time which is a delay for the customer.

2. Inventory

Since value is being stored for a fee (probably in a warehouse), Inventory waste is common in manufacturing. Inventory is any value, whether materials or finished products, that either needs to be turned into something more valuable or sold to customers. And since overhead is being paid to store the products or materials, their value is reduced the longer they remain in there since their profit margin declines with each passing day. For office processes, inventory is a list of action items, your email inbox, and any work you have started but have not fully completed. In your personal life, it is the food in your refrigerator, clothes in your closet, and that book you started writing that you haven’t finished yet!

3. Motion

When machinery, equipment and people move unnecessarily, it leads to Motion waste. The movement can be anything, such as moving, stretching, bending, reaching, lifting and walking, that doesn’t bring any value. There is a need to redesign all work that leads to Motion waste while ensuring productivity and safety is maximized.

4. Waiting

When producing a product for consumers, any inaction that increases costs is known as Waiting. This is waste because while the product awaits its transformation, the organization is incurring overhead. Essentially, any potential profit the product would have made from being sold is continuously stripped as the organization continues to incur overhead from Waiting. Eventually, this contributes to Inventory waste as well, on top of destroying the flow of information and production materials. Waiting occurs in service processes as well, such as waiting for approvals, waiting for someone to return from vacation, and waiting due to confusion or indecision about what to do next in a process that is not well-defined.

5. Overprocessing

When there are more steps, components or there’s work being put into the production of a product that the customer doesn’t require, Overprocessing occurs. In the case of manufacturing, this includes adding in more functionality into the product than needed, making adjustments to already installed components, taking a solution and overengineering it, performing unnecessary analyses, pushing components beyond their limits and unnecessarily using high precision equipment. When packaging a product, can it be taped with one strip of tape or does it actually need 3 strips? In the office, does your manager want a 3-page project update or just one paragraph? Do your customers actually look at all the charts you create, or just one key chart, and ignore the rest?

6. Overproduction

If there’s one waste that can negatively impact the success of an organization as a whole, it is Overproduction. When more products or materials have been produced than customers are willing to buy, that is when overproduction happens. When your organization overproduces what it is offering, other wastes can occur as well. These include Motion, Waiting and Inventory. In the office, if you start working on a presentation for a meeting too early, there is a chance that the meeting gets delayed or cancelled, and you will have wasted that time, or have to go back and update your slides with the latest information. The goal is to do work “just in time” not too far in advance when things can change or get rescheduled.

7. Defects

Defects are the most recognizable forms of waste when it comes to Lean Six Sigma, especially when it comes to manufacturing. In manufacturing, instances of Defects include details missing in assemblies, end products that are in need of reworking and scrapped components and products. This waste is one of the biggest when it comes to manufacturing since it also leads to Overprocessing, Transportation and Overproduction waste. Defects also occur in the office and service processes, with incorrect invoice amounts, wrong customer ID numbers, emails sent to the wrong person, and spelling errors.

8. Skills

This waste has another name: Non-Utilized Talent. This particular waste can affect different types of organizations in various industries (so far, all the examples we have seen have to do with the manufacturing industry). This waste happens when management doesn’t use all of its workers to their fullest ability.

This type of waste also occurs when management decides to improve their processes while ignoring feedback from their employees, even when it comes to continuous improvement. If employees who directly deal with the processes are not allowed to voice their input when it comes to improving them, especially on an ongoing basis, this is considered non-utilized talent a waste.

Knowing these wastes is a step in the right direction towards eliminating them. You can’t even begin to improve a process unless you know what is causing a drop in performance in the first place. To that end, TIMWOODS is an important acronym to know.

Download a free TIM WOODS (8 wastes) Powerpoint slides >>>

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The 8 Forms of Deadly Waste in Lean Six Sigma

Lean Six Sigma is one of the most advanced and effective methodologies available for business process improvement and optimization. It is especially adept in battling a wide range of problems and inefficiencies. To help better understand and deal with waste, this approach classifies them into the 8 Forms of Deadly Waste. This classification is important because it makes waste much easier to uncover and then eradicate. It also helps you identify environmental improvement opportunities.

The 8 Forms of Deadly Waste can be easily remembered with the mnemonic DOWNTIME:

• Defects
• Overproduction
• Waiting
• Non-value added processing
• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Employee skills underutilized

Let’s examine each one individually:

Defects

Whenever a business process ends up with an outcome that was not the desired one, all the effort and resources that had gone into producing it would have been wasted. This is why defects and errors of any sort are always undesirable, and are always a major source of waste. This does not just apply to manufacturing, but to providing services to clients and especially processes internal to the company.

Overproduction

We all know that overdoing anything in our personal life is something to be avoided, but this is a type of waste that often goes completely unnoticed in the business world. Whenever something is produced in a higher amount that was necessary, it’s a type of waste, Worst of all, it also multiplies all the other wastes through the rest of the processes. Overproduction often stems from the inability to estimate and forecast business correctly, and from fear of being late with deliveries. However, it is an expensive and risky way to protect against late deliveries to the customer.

Waiting

Any idle time that is part of a business process is actually time wasted. If a step in the process has to be delayed while waiting for raw materials, parts, equipment, instructions or information, it is always going to lead to waste, since the organization’s potential productivity is going to be squandered. That time cannot easily be made up except through overtime and delayed shipments. Every time work stops, it’s a waste, and an opportunity to improve.

Non-value added processing

When trying to standardize an activity, many businesses experience the pitfall of adding steps to a process that are not actually adding value. This means that all the resources and time that go into those steps are wasted, and could have been used to produce value instead. Examples of this type of waste might vary from having the same thing reported twice in the same spreadsheet or report, to having an unneeded layer of packaging to a product that does not add any value to the customer or protect the product from damage while being transported.

Transportation

Most businesses processes tend to include transporting materials, people, products, equipment, tools or even information and very often at least some of that turns out to be unneeded. This is really an activity that doesn’t add any real value to a process and is a common point of possible failure. This means that excess transportation leads to a lot of waste and could have adverse effects on the reliability of the outcome on top of that.

Inventory

Inventory waste is especially dangerous despite the fact that it sounds quite benign at first glance. Whenever there is an excess supply of materials, information or products, it is often a sign of deeper inefficiency or inadequacy of the current state of the process involved. Everything that stays in inventory instead of being utilized has required an input of resources to get to where it is and all of those resources have been used quite inefficiently. Additionally, while something is in inventory it is always subject to deterioration, so its value will always decrease while the cost of having it around will steadily become higher.

Motion

Motion requires both time and energy and no matter if the motion is physical or virtual, an excess of it is bound to slow a process down and create significant waste. This is a very intuitive concept, it’s just essential that one applies it to everything from physical movement of people and machines to unnecessary movement of files on virtual systems.

Employee skills underutilized

The workforce available to a business is one of its most important assets and resources, and forms a significant part of the cost of providing the customer with the product or service sold. As with any other resource, not using it to its full potential is a waste. But humans are creative and are natural problem-solvers, which means that allowing them to apply their abilities, skills and experience would always lead to unpredictable positive benefits to the business.

Connection to the Environment

In addition, these 8 forms of waste have an environmental impact as well.

Defects and overproduction can lead to items needing to be disposed of. Inventory requires extra floor space, lighting, heating and cooling. Waiting pushes out the work, requiring overtime and more energy to keep the lights on. Transportation requires fuel and extra packaging. If you’d like to learn more about the environmental impact of these wastes, check out the EPA Lean and the Environment toolkit >>>

Next time you are evaluating a process, look for DOWNTIME opportunities to reduce time and reduce your environmental impact.

To learn more about Lean, download the Toyota training slides >>>

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