What is lean? A short introduction to three Lean Principles and the Seven Deadly Wastes.
I would like to give credit to Professor Norman Faull,
the founder of the Lean Institute Africa, for enlightening us with these three principles.
What is this man doing? Thinking.
Lean creates a thinking people, but how? By solving problems and making decisions.
What is this? A bin.
A bin is a repository for waste, so we want to choose what to improve in order to eliminate
wasteful activities from our processes. We're going to take a closer look at the
seven deadly wastes in the next segment. Is there a problem with this image?
We don't know. We don't have a standard so we don't know what is normal or abnormal.
Is the problem the one meerkat standing, the cat hiding, or the one meerkat looking at
you unlike the other animals? So once we have a standard,
the lean principle is that we want to know what is normal from what is abnormal, right now,
and we want to respond to it, right now. A lean company eliminates fluctuations in
its processes, becomes more and more agile, and responsive to customer
demands and external constraints. The principles of lean manufacturing
apply to any organization that manages processes to deliver value to a customer.
Not only does this apply to automotive assembly plants, call centres,
or packaging companies, but also to hospitals, banks, governmental institutions, and farms.
What are the seven deadly wastes? We leave it to Taishi Ono,
the founder of the Toyota production system, to explain to us what waste is.
"All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order
to the point when we collect the cash,
and we are reducing the timeline by removing the non-value added waste."
The seven wastes are time eaters. They make work harder
and they compromise the capability of the key processes to do better, faster, and cheaper.
Here are the seven wastes that affect the performance of processes.
We have the waste of overproduction, which is producing at a rate exceeding the customer's
demand, i.e. producing more than is needed, faster than is needed, or before it is needed.
This is the deadliest waste as producing "just in case" increases the other wastes.
The waste of inventory is any supply and excess of process or demand requirements.
Inventory creates bottlenecks. We have the waste of waiting,
which is any idle time of an activity waiting for the preceding one to be finished.
The waste of transport is any material movement that does not
directly support immediate production. The waste of motion is any movement
of people which does not contribute added value to the product or service.
The waste of processing is the redundant effort,
production, or communication which adds no value to a product or service.
For example, you have quality control activities, double data capturing, complex process without
proper jig, searching for equipment. And finally, we have the waste of defects,
which is the repair or rework of a product or service to fulfill customer requirements.
Who eliminates this waste? People, not external consultants.
The people who operate the processes know the processes best.
They are the most affected by waste, so isn't it both disrespectful and wasteful not to engage
people's minds to improve their processes? We want to create a thinking people.