Low hanging fruit

Just in time tomatoes

Identifying waste

I’m not talking about determining what belongs in the trashcan. Waste really means anything unwanted. If we are talking about your yard or your garden, then waste is a overripe fruit or an annoying weed. These waste are easily identified and have a simple corrective action: pick the vegetable sooner and pull the weeds as they appear. At work, manufacturing and production waste are sometimes hard to identify. Especially later in the process when you have depleted your improvement ideas and implemented everything you can think of. Are we done or can we continue to improve? Lean manufacturing methods provide tools and ideas to identify manufacturing waste. Now it is time to check these types of operations. There are 7 total non-value added categories. The simple and obvious ones are not in this article. They right are in front of you ripe and ready to be picked. Each different category is about a different mind set or thought pattern needed for identification.

Quality is an up most concern and a top priority in every organization. Look at your process with a different mind set. We are programmed to improve and improve again but there is a point where this is taken to far and it’s called over production. Producing a 32-micron finish where only a 63-micron is required. Now the federate can be increased reducing cycle time and thus increasing value. This is only one example. Carefully review the customer requirements and meet these specifications exactly but do not exceed any. Personally, I have had parts rejected due to a superior surface finish. It’s seems crazy but there was a reason for a 125-micron finish and it was expected to be maintained. I thought we were delivering a higher quality product than our competitors.

Another overlooked waste is unnecessary motion. This type of waste is considered invisible waste. Most importantly, check for waiting or idle times, unnecessary reaching or footsteps, unproductive meetings and redundant paperwork. There can be a non-value adding weed hiding in the darkest corner or the most over-traveled path.

You have to check your tomatoes every day. Pick each when the time is right ensuring that not to many build up on the vine. With this in mind, think about your company’s inventory. Inventory cost money and takes up valuable space. You should strive to pick your fruit just in time. Not to early and never late. Managers are scared of late deliveries and the easy fix is to put some food on the shelf. The correct action is to continually improve process times thus eliminating the need to stock parts.

Waste is everywhere and stepping outside the garden and looking in at your processes in varying lighting will make all the varieties of weeds show their stems. At this stage of growth, pulling them is simple, finding them is hard.