The elimination of waste has to be a good thing but do the old definitions fit the modern world?
Practitioners of Lean techniques spend much of their time on the elimination of waste.
Waste in Lean is defined as anything in the business for which the customer will not pay and is traditionally identified by the acronym TIMWOODS.
Taiichi Ohno the Chief Engineer at Toyota identified seven wastes (Muda) as part of the famous Toyota Production System. These seven wastes made up the acronym TIMWOOD – they were Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing and finally Defects. In the 1990’s the eighth waste of Skills was added and we have worked with these ever since.
The last change was made in the 1990’s or over thirty years ago and things have moved on a bit since then and so I think it is time to look again at waste. We need to view it through modern eyes and not those of the 1990’s.
The next seven blogs will look at each of the seven so called wastes in some detail and see if they are fir for modern times.
In the meantime we need to look at what I consider to be the most important waste and one that is omitted from the list.
The Most Important Waste Of All
TIME
The differences between TIME as waste and all the others is that it is totally irrecoverable and unmanageable. Once we have wasted time we can never get it back. It’s gone forever. It is unmanageable in that no matter how good a manager you are you still have the same 24 hours in a day as the worst manager.
As we move toward the idea of a four day or thirty hour week the first waste we need to address is TIME. Effective use of time will allow all other problems to be addressed. If all we are doing is constantly firefighting and moving from one inefficient use of our day to another we will never achieve our ultimate goal.
We have all been guilty of it. I have wasted huge amounts of time and it’s gone. The ultimate sunk cost.
Whilst it is not possible to do anything about time lost there is nothing stopping us doing something about time to come.
In his book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit Of Less” Greg McKeown sums it all up in one wonderful phrase: It’s all about discerning the vital few from the trivial many. Only once we achieve that can we stop wasting the most valuable asset of all and begin to sort out the others. Without time moving forward is impossible.
In these environmentally friendly times we need to remember that time is a resource that cannot be recycled or reused, so use it carefully.
How much time will you waste this week?
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