What is waste (muda)?

In lean working everything revolves around one question: what does the customer pay for, and what not? The customer pays for the right item at the right moment. Everything around that is necessary or unnecessary. The unnecessary part is what lean calls waste. It is often invisible, because people work hard at it.

Lean knows eight kinds. Waiting: for a forklift, an item or a decision. Walking and moving: too many steps, bending or reaching. Transport: goods that are moved unnecessarily. Too much stock: more on the shelf than needed, so that space and money are tied up. Errors: a wrong item or quantity, with a return as a result. Double work: entering the same data twice. Too many handlings: steps that add nothing. And unused knowledge: employees know where it goes wrong, but nobody asks them.

In a warehouse, waste is easy to find when you walk along with one order, from arrival to dispatch. Where the order stands still, goes back or passes through many hands, there is waste. A tool to draw that path is value stream mapping.

The aim is not that people work harder, but that their work delivers more. That is why it matters not to discuss waste as a reproach. The cause usually lies in the layout, the agreements or the system, not in the employee. A tidy workplace, 5S, removes a lot of searching and waiting, and a calm flow prevents work from lying around.

You tackle waste in small steps: choose one kind and one place, change something and see what happens. How we approach that in an SME warehouse, you read at lean in the warehouse.