- Know that most waste hides in plain view, as pointed out by Henry Ford, Taiichi Ohno, Shigeo Shingo, and others. Wastes other than poor quality are asymptomatic as they do nothing to announce their presence.
- Ford wrote that it is possible to waste only three things; time, material, and energy.
- Waste motion wastes the time of people.
- Wasted cycle time constitutes a waste of the time of things, and inventory is proportional to cycle time. Work in a process that is not having something done to it (transformation) represents wasted cycle time.
- Wasted materials are wasted money regardless of whether they are environmental aspects. Pay attention to everything that is thrown away as well as to the product itself.
- Wasted energy also is wasted money. Identify the gap between the amount of energy that is actually required for the job and the amount that is actually used. - Treat the waste as a problem subject to corrective and preventive action (CAPA) to remove it, and deploy the lessons learned to related operations.
By WILLIAM LEVINSON