How to Avoid Waste, Unevenness and Overburden in the Business?

How to Avoid Waste, Unevenness and Overburden in the Business?

Anyone with any degree of Lean training would know “Muda”. It is often translated as simply “Waste”. In Japanese, waste is identified as Muda (無駄) a word meaning “futility; uselessness; wastefulness”. By identifying and removing the Muda, waste, we get continuous improvement.

The most common acronyms for Muda are TIMWOOD (or sometimes 8 wastes – DOWNTIME)

Transport Moving the product around unnecessarily is a waste of time, effort, and increases the likelihood that it will be damaged Inventory Any unused material is wasted capital. It is money just sitting around in the form of raw materials (0% complete), work-in-process (50% complete), or finished goods (100% complete).

Motion The “wear and tear” on the equipment or the people involved in the process. If you are transporting the product around unnecessarily, you are also wasting the motion of the trucks, forklifts and warehouse workers.

Waiting Time that the product is sitting there – not being transported or processed. This is a large source of waste in physician offices.

Over-processing Doing more to the product than is necessary Over-production Making more than is necessary, usually because the production batches are too large Defects Imperfect production that requires re-work, or doing work again But “Mura” and “Muri” are often never touched on. As you take a more holistic view of the processes these become more apparent. And as you move up through any organisation/company, its part of your job to identify and remove them.

‘Everyone knows the human toll of burnout. Unchecked organizational norms insidiously create the conditions for burnout—but leaders can change them to make burnout less likely.’ Eric Garton – HBR

Mura – Unevenness Mura is best translated as Unevenness. It’s a key driver of wastes throughout organisations and also with its people. Imagine being simply flooded with a massive to-do list that never goes down and nothing ever gets finished. Then imagine you go to work one day and find you have nothing to do. No client calls. It’s the beginning of the month and everything has gone quiet.

Then 2 weeks into the month the rush starts. The workload rockets and we start to make mistakes as we try to balance output and quality. Mura causes many of the issues we all face in day to day work.

As you move away from the front line, we have to look at the unevenness across the business and do what we can to solve it. What is driving the unevenness? Do we spread bonus payments

out during the month to avoid last minutes demands on the last day of the month? Should we wait until the end of the month to send invoices?

By reflecting on the impact unevenness is having on both your internal processes and your customer delivery is critical to trying to remove it.

Overburdened employees burnout – it’s a fact Muri – Overburden Overburden can be caused by processes having uneven demand (Mura) or potentially by reducing wastes within processes. Whatever the reason, overburden occurs when we place too much burden on a part of the process.

This could be the overburden of machines – asking them to work faster than they are capable and perhaps not giving enough time for day to day maintenance.

But more often than not fail to identify when we overburden our people.

Overburdening people is one of the most damaging things that can happen within organisations.

This can be the result of aggressive cutting, restructures or even the result of poorly planned transformation activities that are meant to drive improvements in the business.

In January 2017, Future workforce and Kronos identified that burnout is responsible for over 50% of their annual turnover. And 30% of these employees blamed the overburden on poor management.

Therefore, getting the balance right is critical.

And let’s be honest – it’s often the best employees that get overburdened. It’s not the average or poor performers that get pulled into various projects. It’s our best people – the ones we can count on to make a difference.

The manager’s role The focus as a manager must first and foremost be on getting the front line team to understand “muda” and how to remove waste from every process to drive efficiencies and great value.

However, as managers, we must take a high level view of the end to end process and by removing silo’s, functions and departments from our thinking we must find ways to ensure a consistent flow of work across all sections to support our teams.

Do you have the right people in the right places?

Do you have uneven demand within the value stream and what actions can be taken to even it out?

Are there certain individuals or sections which are doing the lion’s share and are potentially overburdened? If so, how can the responsibility or workload are shared? Is the team structure or organisational structure fit for purpose? ______________________________________________________________________________

Contact us Website: www.leanscape.io Mail: reagan@leanscape.io Contact No.: (34) 683327605