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This is the fifth in a series of articles on the Seven Types of Waste[i]. This article addresses waiting.
Waiting
This type of waste is when you, other employees, customer, material, or equipment sits idle waiting. Think about all the waiting rooms there are. As a customer do you want to wait? No but we sometime have come to expect the wait. I have been to doctor’s office where the waiting room is empty or full did not matter but in some I was seen on time and other I have waited over an hour.
Ever gone to a meeting only to have to wait because some one was late? Or maybe you showed up late. Think of all the dollars in pay being spent while employees sit wait to start.
How about that order form that you filled out online but did not get filled until the next day. How many times did that sit and wait? Or have you seen key equipment sitting waiting to be repaired? What kinds of cost are there in that delay?
Waiting is a big one in my book. Why, because many times we, as customer, have come to expect it in some companies or industries and yet we don’t in others. Why is that? It’s because that is the way it always has been. But we as customer pay for it just as your customer pay for the waiting that happens in your organization.
Some symptoms of Waiting that you can look for are:
- Under-utilization of resources
- Reduced productivity
- Increase in investment
- Idle equipment
- Large waiting / storage rooms
- Equipment running, not producing
- Unnecessary testing
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 Waiting:
- Unbalanced work load
- Late start of meetings
- Unplanned maintenance
- Long process set-up times
- Misuse of automation
- Quality problems
- Unleveled scheduling
- Ineffective layout
- Specialization
- Batch processing
- “Things” not at right location
I invite you to post what you see around you that are Motions of Operators that could be changed.
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[i] 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, and Processing.
Tags: Method, Seven Types of Waste