3 Types of waste

Hi,

Today Im going to talk about one of the most important things in Lean, and this is wastes,

or as known as the 3 M's, Mura, Muri and Muda are the 3 common types of waste,

Mura 斑 - means inconsistency

Muri 無理 - means unreasoble requirements

Muda 無駄 - Pure waste non value adding actions

As we will learn those 3 are bonded and effects each other.

Lets start from the last one,Muda, Muda is all the things which are done but have no direct contribution to the customer requirements. i.e: Movement - to bring a part or to search for the required part. now if we have to do this movement it can be translated to labor time which immediately effects the capacity and the inconsistency. why?!, because when one looks for screwdriver five minutes the other or the less experienced may search for it for 10 minutes or even more and the third may search for it 1 minute. and there we go with our inconsistency to deliver the same product in a predicted manner to our customer.

further ahead the main 8 types of Muda are:

• Storage

• Transportation

• Over production

• Processing

• Movement

• Defects

• Untapped ingenuity

Now, those wastes excists in every process and in every activity, our goal and wisdom as leaders is to ask the right questions and together with our teams try to look and discover those wastes in order to find ways to eliminate, avoid and reduce them.

We need to discuss those things with our teams and really understand the process and what is done in the Gemba otherwise we will become captivated by our perception and knowledge, and as a result we may lead to some minor result in the short run but in the long run things will return as were before.

one of the key points is learn to listen and try to delegate responsibilities, when we will learn to do this we will see that our resources will become much more open minded and they will know that they can trust us as leaders.

Until next time...