Is Waste (Muda) Preventing You From Working Smarter?

Are you working harder these days or working smarter and how do you know the difference? Many of the reasons we end up working so hard — and not so smart — have to do withour failure to recognize those things that waste our precious time. We may just have the wrong paradigm. The focus in a lean thinking paradigm is to eliminate waste, or muda (the Japanese word for “waste”).

Working Harder

In our western culture, our values influence the organizational design. The harder we work, the better we feel. The only problem with this mentality is that working harder does not necessarily translate into working more productively. In other words, the goal is producing results, and working hard does not always translate into results. To produce results, we need to work smarter, not harder.

There is an easy way to tell the difference between working harder and working smarter. The symptoms of working harder include:

• Working more than 40 hours a week (overtime);
• Struggling to meet deadlines;
• Juggling multiple projects to get more done;
• Reworking/editing/repairing your projects to make them better;
• Wasting valuable time on “non-value-added” activities; and
• Asking for more resources (time, money, people, or equipment) to solve a problem.

We all work hard to some degree. We are pressed for time, so we take work home, yet we still struggle to meet deadlines as we rush from project to project. What is going on? Well, the biggest waste of all is that we are underutilizing our brains to solve the problem. We need information, knowledge, and wisdom to be efficient. Working harder will not resolve the chaos. The only way to reduce the chaos in our lives is to work smarter, not harder.

Working Smarter

Working smarter requires that we understand the waste that occurs in our organizations and that we have a system to eliminate the waste in a continuous manner. In a lean organization it is the objective and responsibility of process improvement or the quality system (as in ISO compliance) to identify and eliminate all wasted activity. Just what does this waste look like?

The Eight Categories of Muda

1. Overproduction
   Manufacturing of products before they are needed or processing of unnecessary information, (i.e. forms or data that are not needed).
2. Idle time, Waiting or Delay
   Idle time spent waiting for something (tools, supplies, parts, or information). In today’s economy, all information (money is a form of information) should be communicated instantaneously. Delays mean that the potential for improvement is obvious and (in absence of regulation) should be easy.
3. Unnecessary Transporting, Conveyance or Movement
   Unnecessary movement of products, people, or information. Transporting materials, parts or finished goods into or out of storage (inventory) or between processes.
4. Unnecessary Processing
   Providing higher quality or extra operations than are necessary to meet the customer’s needs. Using more expensive equipment or tools where simpler ones would suffice. Having meetings or people at meetings that are not needed.
5. Unnecessary Inventory
   Maintaining excess inventory, supplies, work in process (WIP), or finished goods in order to compensate for process inaccuracy or the other mudas. Inventory is a sign or symptom of waste somewhere.
6. Unnecessary Motion
   Not focusing on ergonomic design.Any wasted motion to pick up parts or stack parts. Any wasted walking or moving around. Wasting time looking for things in a cluttered work space or desk. Not being organized;
7. Defects, Correction, Repair or Rework
   Design of goods that do not meet customer needs. Performing the same task a second time, rescheduling, and capacity losses. Any mistake correction activity. We should strive to do it right the first time!
8. Underutilizing Employees, Oversight or Inspection
   Not using the full productive capacity of all employees’ creativity and thinking power. Having one worker (a supervisor, inspector, or manager) watch another worker do his job. If a worker cannot be trusted to do a job, an efficient enterprise retrains or replaces the worker, or redesigns the task. Having one worker (a manager) inspect the work of another after it has been completed. A worker capable of performing the task should be competent to determine whether it is up to standards.

Why Work Smarter?

Working smarter releases tremendous amounts of capacity within your organization – capacity that you did not realize you had. By working smarter, it is not unrealistic to find that you can accomplish 100% more work with the same resources. If you continue to work at it, you can increase your capacity again for a 300% or more increase. That is the real power of business process management.

The rewards of working smarter include:

• Going home on time to see your family;
• Completing all assigned work and meeting your deadlines;
• Focusing on one project at a time;
• Getting your work done right the first time;
• Working only on value added activities; and
• Getting more done with fewer resources.

Think This is Impossible?

Then you need to learn more about how to use process improvement programs to work smarter in your organization by attending the next How to Align a System of People and Processes for Results class. If you’re eager to learn more about creating order out of the chaos you feel at work, the How to Create Well-Defined Processes class is right for you.

ISO 9001 Quality Auditor classes are forming now for Internal Auditor or Lead Auditor. Call for information on having your own private in-house classes today.

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Originally published in 2005 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title Is Waste (Muda) Preventing You From Working Smarter?. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com