Lean Manufacturing: How to Address the Eight Types of Waste

Huyett Marketing Department
07/14/2022

Waste can take many forms in the manufacturing process, but at its core, waste is anything that does not provide value to the customer. It drives up costs and hinders a company’s competitiveness in the market, which is why lean manufacturing can be a game-changing approach to your manufacturing processes.

What is Lean Manufacturing?

Lean manufacturing, or lean production,
is a set of best practices that focus on maximizing customer value through the elimination of waste.

The concept was first introduced to the manufacturing industry by Henry Ford in the early 1900s, and later refined in the Toyota Production System by Kiichiro Toyoda and others of Toyota Motor Corporation shortly after World War II. Currently, there are eight “wastes” associated with this methodology. Identifying wastes can help you conceptualize ways to streamline your production.

What are the Eight Types of Waste?

Toyota identified seven types of waste, with the eighth type of waste added in the 1990s:

Transportation:
The movement of product and materials in the warehouse that wastes time and resources
Inventory:
Static product or materials that occupy the space of moving product or materials
Motion:
The unnecessary movement of people to do their work
Waiting:
Idle equipment or people caused by bottlenecks in the production process
Overproduction:
Extra manufacturing that causes Inventory and Waiting waste
Overprocessing:
Developing processes that are more complicated than necessary to produce repeatable results
Defects:
Unusable product that wastes manufacturing time and labor and requires extra quality control resources
Underused Skills:
Failure to listen to creative ideas and capitalize on the company’s human resources

Lean Manufacturing Practices

Lean manufacturing practices are the actions a manufacturer takes to identify wastes and respond to them with better processes. Ultimately, this will lead to a stronger focus on customer value.

Huyett Case Study: Lean Practices and Continuous Improvement

At Huyett, we are continuously evaluating our workflows to weed out waste. It is an ongoing process that drives our commitment to excellence as customer demands, economies, workforces, and technologies are always changing. We asked our departmental experts about how they identify waste and develop new solutions to streamline their processes. While these solutions address current issues, they stem from a foundational, unified alignment towards continuous improvement.

1. Transportation

“Our latest strategy for streamlining product movement was to optimize our main warehouse for fast-moving products and move slower inventory to other holding facilities. Even within that, we placed the fastest-moving product in the main warehouse closest to the ship line and on the lowest shelves on the racks in those aisles. We’re always looking for ways we can rework a process to get parts to our customers more efficiently.”
— Josh Snider, Distribution Division Director

2. Inventory

“Huyett has focused on continually increasing inventory accuracy. In the last year alone, we improved it from 96% in August to 99% in May. We’ve also made our process for tracking inventory quantity more efficient, which means accurate quantities of parts are on the shelf, ready to ship.”
— Nick Wolff, Quality Assurance Manager

3. Motion

“We’ve recently reworked our ship line to include a combination of gravity and powered conveyors. Instead of having to walk away from their workstations to push boxes along a conveyor belt, our shipping agents are now able to stay in their work zone while tilted rollers move boxes towards them. We’re also working with outside stakeholders to develop a process that would create zones for pickers; this way, they would spend less time rolling carts and more time picking parts.”
— Josh Snider, Distribution Division Director

4. Waiting

“When there’s a bottleneck in our manufacturing process, we strip it down to its core function to make it as efficient as possible. We also identify any reasons that equipment might sit idle and solve those problems one at a time. We extensively cross train known bottlenecks to eliminate staffing as a cause for idle machinery. We maintain continuous workflows with detailed work instructions and robust problem-solving plans. Most importantly, we communicate quickly, clearly, and regularly so everyone knows what part they play and how to do their jobs well.”
— Jeremiah Van Doren

5. Overproduction

“We’ve worked hard to eliminate this waste by developing detailed production schedules and investing in technology that helps us reduce scrap. Our interdepartmental relationship with our Sales team is also key; we keep up on current customer demand and communicate our production timing so our customers can depend on us to get their orders to them when they need them.”
— Jeremiah Van Doren, Production Manager

“As a distributor, we also have to think about not over-buying. We use effective inventory management strategies to monitor historical demand and market forecasts. We then factor in actual lead time trends from suppliers, plus minimal safety stock, to ensure availability while also initiating reorder cycles as close to “just-in-time” as possible. This helps save warehouse space and keeps products from aging.”
— Anna Keith, Supply Chain Manager

6. Overprocessing

“Right now, we’re putting in extra effort to mill down raw materials to desired tolerances because of global steel supply chain challenges, which is a necessary extra step for the time being. But by utilizing state-of-the-art equipment, technology, and maintaining detailed schedules, we are keeping our manufacturing processes streamlined.”
— Jeremiah Van Doren, Production Manager

7. Defects

“We’ve improved our inspection system and added new technology that catches defects the human eye can’t catch. This happens early on in the process to eliminate a buildup of issues. When we do have defects, we work through a ‘nonconformant form’ with the ‘5 Whys’ method. This helps us address the root cause, so we aren’t constantly fixing the same problems.”
— Jeremiah Van Doren, Production Manager

8. Underused Skills

“We foster a culture that encourages people to contribute ideas and offers accessibility to professional development. In biweekly 1:1 meetings, employees are encouraged to provide open feedback to their manager, guided to set their own personal goals, and welcomed to ask for learning opportunities. Our managers are trained to recognize talent and innovation and channel it in a relevant direction. We encourage employees to speak up about their strengths and professional desires. As tools to guide that professional development, we have a published job bank with company-wide access to detailed job descriptions, a skills assessment form that allows an employee to develop their own skill set, and a personal development planning process that allows an employee to guide themselves through training, coaching, and guidance from their manager and cross-functional peer mentors.”
— Walker Hermann, Human Resource Generalist

Company Culture

Lean manufacturing is not a single action or project, but a commitment to ongoing process improvement that stems from an innovative and humble
company culture. Continuous improvement requires a company to critically evaluate its processes, expose areas of waste, and set benchmarks for performance to measure success. A deep understanding of a process and how it affects value to the customer provides the basis for employee training and coaching opportunities. These activities lead to more efficient workflows, higher employee engagement, and a company culture of excellence.

How to Implement Lean Manufacturing Practices

Before
implementing lean manufacturing practices, there are a few things to keep in mind:

Simplify your manufacturing design.
Waste often comes in the form of extra work, and simplifying your processes is a way to reduce that waste.
Consistently look for improvements.
This should be an ongoing step as your business is a living entity that is constantly growing.
Create a culture of continuous improvement.
Like most changes in business, the success of lean manufacturing depends on company buy-in, which first requires a commitment from owners, executives, and management to ensure that it has staying power.

Once your company has committed to lean manufacturing, your approach to eliminating the eight types of waste should come from these five principles:

Map:
Follow a product cycle from beginning to end to identify waste in the process
Flow:
Eliminate bottlenecks and ensure continuously moving workflows
Value:
Focus only on actions that create value for your customer
Perfection:
Orient your solutions to constantly search for the “perfect” workflow
Pull:
Begin work only when there is demand for it; do not predetermine a workload when the demand is unknown

All In A Day’s Work

Minimizing waste in the manufacturing industry is an iterative, never-ending process, but each day brings new opportunities. At Huyett, our standards are high, and we strive to consistently deliver the absolute best for all of our customers.

“Huyett continuously collects and monitors data and reviews our internal Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to identify trends so corrections can be made to drive improvements in our organization and improve customer service. The continuous improvement mindset is ingrained deep within our organization. It is not an action we take; it’s who we are.”
— Nick Wolff, Quality Assurance Manager