Overproduction, one of the Seven Types of Waste

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This is the second in a series of articles on the Seven Types of Waste. This article addresses Overproduction.

First before I get into Overproduction 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:

1. Corrections
2. Overproduction
3. Movement of material or information
4. Motion of operators
5. Waiting
6. Inventory or other resources that are not being used
7. Processing

Overproduction

Overproduction is when you make too much of something or you perform too much of a service for some one. Have you ever held a meeting and made copies for that meeting? Most people make a few extra, do you? That is overproduction they will end up in the trash. Or have you every as a question about something in a store and the salesman goes on an on answering your question when all you wanted was the simple answer? That salesman was overproducing. In a service industry knowing whether you are overproducing or not is tricky but if you give the shorter version to a customers answer and then ask them if they understand your answer you can find out if they need more information.

Some symptoms of overproduction that you can look for are:

• Excessive raw materials
• Extra inventory
• Unnecessary work
• Excessive floor space utilized
• Unbalanced material flow
• Backups between departments
• Complex information management
• Disposal charges
• Extra waste handling & treatment
• High utility costs

Look around you 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 Overproduction:

• Just-in-case logic
• Misuse of automation
• Staying busy
• Long process set-up
• Unleveled scheduling
• Unbalanced workload
• Low yield
• Over engineered equipment/capability
• Redundant inspections
• Lack of reuse & recycling

I invite you to post what you see around you that are Overproduction that could be changed.

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Tags: Method, Seven Types of Waste

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 at 11:21 am and is filed under Six Sigma Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.