At the core of Lean is distinguishing value added from non-value added activities. Fundamental to this is for everyone creating and delivering a product or service to identify their internal customers and the final customer. These relationships are central to meeting the needs of the customer.
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WHAT IS THE DEFINITION OF NON-VALUE ADDED ACTIVITIES?
Useful activities that the customer will pay for are considered value-added. So, activities or elements of the product or service that the customer does not value or is unwilling to pay for are non-value added activities. Using the Kano tool to identify product or service components that are Basic, Satisfiers and Delighters is a way to separate these and assign costs to them.
WHERE SHOULD YOU LOOK FOR WASTE?
OVERPRODUCTION
Remember the episode from “I Love Lucy” when Lucy and Ethyl were working on a candy production line and it was going too fast for them to keep up? This is still hilarious, but it also exemplifies producing faster than is needed by the next process or customer. What did Lucy do? She put them in her blouse, ate some and finally was overwhelmed. The production step prior to her could have thought they were being efficient by producing as much as possible. This is a common problem.
Producing earlier than needed by the next process or customer forces the next step to stockpile the items, ignor the requests or create sub-processess to deal with this. Look for sub-processes that deal with early arriving items.
Producing more than is needed also creates problems. It forces the next process, perhaps another department to find space for the material until they are ready for it. Look for extra storage spaces.
In the practice of just-in-time inventory, delivering too early is just as bad as producing too late. Parts need to be available at a certain location, at a certain time, according to the customer’s schedule. Having the product early, too late, or in quantities that are too great, will result in undesirable consequences, such as” extra storage space, extra raw materials, extra transportation and scheduling costs.
INVENTORY
Parts, raw materials, work-in-progress (party finished goods), inventory, supplies, and finished goods are all forms of inventory. Inventory is considered waste since it does not add value to the product. The customer is really only interested and wants to pay for what they are actually purchcasing and consuming. Inventory requires extra space, transportation and materials. In addition, idle inventory can be lose its value due to damange, obsolesence, and detioriation. Identify and calculate the value of all these activities and figure out now much this adds to your overhead or the cost of the actual product itself. No customer wants to pay for this.
REPAIR/REJECTS
The repair or rework of defective parts involves a second attempt at producing a good item. Rejects involving scrapping of the whole part are a waste of resources. Having rejects in a continuous flow manufacturing process defeats the purpose of continuous flow. Line operators are used to correct problems. Often, if there are consistent repairs or rejects, sub-processes are setup the handle these or finished proudcts are purchased from outside sources. Look for clues in these areas as well.
MOTION
The efficient use of the body is critical to the well being of workers. Extra uneeded motions are wasteful. Employees should not have to walk excessively, lift heavy loads, bend awkwardly, reach too far, repeat motions, etc.
WAITING
When the product, service or components of the product wait for the next step, there is waste here. There are many examples of this; long change overtimes, uneven scheduling of work, long and unecessary meetings (sound familiar?) downtime, lack of parts, lost tools and incomplete instructions are all examples of waste in a process. Waiting is one of the most common forms of waste.
A simple process we use to help find them is the process walk. Simply put, we follow the entire process as it makes its way from start to finish. We take notes, ask questions and take pictures. We then put together a map, similiar to a route on a road map with stops along the way. Showing this to the workers and management always brings out amazing comments and often some quick solutions.
TRANSPORT
All forms of transportation are waste, some are necessary, but you need to think of tranportation in this way to reduce it. Poor plant layouts, cell or work area designs, batch processing of information long lead times, large storage areas and many scheduling problems all are waste adding costs without value.
SUB-PROCESSES
When you discover a sub-process or a process that is required outside the normal flow of the process, this is often waste. Too many approvals is a good example of this, as well as many inspections, adding handling processes due to lack of space, maintaining extra copies of documents and product fixes are all examples of subprocesses. Sub processes are often right in front of people, but they are seen as SOP, standard operating procedures.
