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This is the third in a series of articles on the Seven Types of Waste. This article addresses excessive material and information movement.
First before I get into Material and Information Movement let me explain what waste is in six sigma. Waste is any activity that does not produce value, value in the “eyes” of the customer, not you. The seven types of waste are:
- Corrections
- Overproduction
- Movement of material or information
- Motion of operators
- Waiting
- Inventory or other resources that are not being used
- Processing
Movement of material or information
This type of waste is when you take any material for information and have to move it from one place to another. You may ship it or carry it your self but that movement does not create any value for the customer in fact it is lost time because it delays your product or service from getting to your customer. Even an Email (information being moved from one person to another) is a delay. You may not have to physically take it to the person but you had to prepare the info for sending, send it, and the other person had to receive it. It may wait in their inbox for a day or more unless you spend more time and call them to expedite it. All that movement is just a waste.
Some symptoms of movement of material or information that you can look for are:
- Extra handling
- Extra handling equipment
- Extra inventory
- Large storage areas
- Over-staffing
- Reduced quality
- Extra Paperwork
- Extra hand-offs
- Transport of disposal
- Excessive energy consumption
- Excessive emissions
Look around your place of work or at home and see if you can see any of these. They are just the flag that there is a cause for these that needs to be identified and addressed. What are some of the root causes associated with these symptoms? Let me list them as well. I would associate them with the symptom but many times a root cause shows more than one symptom. So as you read this list of root causes look at the symptoms above and see how many of them it could cause.
Some Root Causes of Movement of material or information:
- Mis-located materials
- Unleveled scheduling
- Unfavorable facility layout
- Redundant inspections
- Poor workplace organization & housekeeping
- Poorly managed waste streams
- Unbalanced processes
- Material stored away from point of use
- Supply chain management
I invite you to post what you see around you that are Overproduction that could be changed.
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Tags: Seven Types of Waste