Thinking Thursday – Other Waste Besides TIM WOOD

Thank you to those who responded to yesterday’s wiki. If you didn’t get a chance or want to expand on your thoughts please post them to the comments.

Yesterday’s wiki post:

“What are other wastes in any other industry besides TIM WOOD (Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over processing, Over production, Defects)”

The wiki is a divergent wiki. A convergent wiki is looking for 1 “correct” response to a
question. A divergent wiki just asks give me all the answers you can think of for the question.

I’ve also launched a lean wiki site http://leanway.wikidot.com/ so please add articles and join in.

Responses:
1) From personal experience I would add lack of strategic alignment is also a waste.
From wikipedia: In services we add unclear communications and missed opportunity to build rapport with the customer.

2) The underutilisation of human potential is also a waste, when the development of people is left “for the better days” and know-how not transmitted to the future generations…

3) I’ll add:
Underutilized people (not exploiting their talents and knowledge as well as not engaging them at all either on accident or as a by product of management arrogance.)
Complexity. It seems to me – I’ve only done this for about 8 years in 3 organizations – that historically improvement has been done with engineering and capital — improvement by addition – this can lead to very complex machines and processes. The best problem solving is improvement by substraction. Find root cause and eliminate if possible not add something to correct a symptom.
I would suggest that from an academic standpoint my additions aren’t really wastes in the same sense as the TIM WOOD wastes. They are really common causes that end up in a lot of 5 whys.
I would add you lack of strategic alignement as well. It could be a special case of underutilized people in that people are engaged on fragmented unaligned activities. They are utilized on stuff that isn’t really important.

4)There is the waste of making the wrong product efficiently.

The waste of excessive information or communication – like emails.

The waste of time – like Covey’s 7 Principles of Highly Effective People, Urgent vs important tasks.

The waste of inappropriate systems – liek how much software is on your computer or network that you don’t use.

Wasted energy and water resources – think energy treasure hunt.

Wasted natural resources – Rocky Mountain institute estimates that 99% of original materials used in production in US becomes waste within 6 weeks of sale like paper.

Mura – the waste of variation

The waste of knowledge – simply letting knowledge disappear.

The waste of no follow through – like when yu save walking distance but don’t do anything with the time saved, then you didn’t really save anything.