Lean Waste 6: Overproduction
Eradicating Waste: The 7 Muda (+1 for the road)
What happens if you make too much stuff that you don’t sell? Right, this:
Over-production naturally results in inventory for another process, even if it is not within your organisation. If stock or inventory isn’t used, you’ve wasted the raw materials and people’s time and of course, the company’s money.
The rules on eradicating over-production are similar to the rules on inventory. Keep the batch sizes small and also consider whether you can make the deliveries similarly smaller and more frequently to match. This allows your clients and customers to also start making use of their purchases earlier.
Tip: Easy, keep production batches small! This reduces waste and speeds up delivery.
Following my talk at Northern Change Facilitators on the 14th April 2016, as promised, the first in a series of blogs on the 7 Lean Wastes, which I am writing and publishing each day for the next 7 days. If you want to check out the session slides I used on Lean Enterprise experimentation, click here.
Lean systems’ roots go back more than 70 years. Made famous by Toyota in the 1970’s and 80’s it’s the centrepiece of lean thinking in today’s world. It aims to improve quality, increase efficiency and efficacy, reduce waste and continuously improve (based on the principle of kaizen) when don’t well, it’s an extremely elegant solution. Get it wrong, and you dishearten forever. Needless to say, it’s benefits can be amazing, if you do it right.
