The Seven Mudas: Wasteful Motion

Back in March, I talked about being successful in Kaizen Teian, one must always be looking to eliminate the eight forms of waste:

1. Moving: Excessive movement of people or machines. It is more common to talk about people movement, as this leads to wasted effort and time.
2. Transportation: Moving a product or material and the costs generated by this process.
3. Waiting: A person or process inaction on the manufacturing line.
4. Overproduction: When there are more parts in production than customers are purchasing. This type of waste spells big trouble for an organization.
5. Excess processing: Products that must be repaired to satisfy customers needs.
6. Inventory: A valuable product or material that is waiting for processing or to be sold.
7. Defects: Scrap or products that require rework.
8. Non-utilized talent: When the management team fails to ensure that all the potential and experience of its people are being used. This is the worst of the eight wastes.

 

These are also nicknamed the “mudas”, which translates to uselessness or wastefulness.

 

What I would like for you to think about this week is what these mudas look like in your life. Taiichi Ohno, developed his “Seven Mudas” while creating the Toyota Production System. Let’s look at them and see if it can apply to areas in our personal life too:

 

Wasteful Motion: 

Do you have everything you need? Or do you run around spending precious time gathering stuff you already should have with you because of procrastination. 

 

Do you spend a lot of time putting out fires? Managing things we feel that others should know, but they seem to mess things up. It may or not be their fault, but do you have systems, policies, and protocols in place for people to manage themselves? (The way you would like things to go with or without you being there?)