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This is the seventh in a series of articles on the Seven Types of Waste[1]. This article addresses Processes.

Processes

This type of waste is when you are doing more than required by the customer. This is a hard one to understand because sometimes doing more for free has a WOW factor for your customers. That is why it is important to know what is of value and what is not. You see sometime you do sometime more that you think the customer wants and they do not care. That is when it becomes a waste.

Also many time we do things that customer thinks are great but then customer values change and the process did not. Those also become waste. Ever hear some one explain what they do as “… because we have always done it that way”. That is a flag that this could be a waste and needs to be changed. Just because we have ALWAYS done it that way does not make it the best or most efficient way to do it. Customer values change and so does the technology that is used to create value.

Take a letter for instance, once upon a time we hand wrote letters and sent them in the mail. Then there were typewriters; then computer; and now we have Email. So you see the world is constantly changing and as such so do you processes. Change to insure they are always creating the best value for your coustomers.

Some symptoms of Process Waste that you can look for are:

Unnecessary work

Extra equipment

Longer lead time

Reduced productivity

Extra material movement

Sorting, testing, inspection

Inappropriate use of resources

Excess energy consumption

Processing by-products

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 Process Waste are:

• Product changes without process changes
• Just-in-case logic
• Old Habits (it’s always been done)
• Lack of communication
• Redundant approvals
• Extra copies, excess information
• Undefined customer requirements
• “Stop-gap” measures that become
• part of the process
• Lack of reuse / recycling

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

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[1] The seven types of waste are: Corrections, Overproduction, Movement of material or information, Motion of operators, Waiting, Processes or other resources that are not being used, and Processing.

Tags: Method, Seven Types of Waste

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Introduction to Six Sigma, 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.