Seven Types of Waste.

Lean philosophy focuses on the customer and identifies any activity that provides value to neither the customer nor the business, thus eliminating waste from the processes of design and delivery of a product and/or service. It also focuses on continuous improvement in a tangible, real, and measurable way.

The seven types of waste are as follows:

• Transport: It is related to the movement of people, tools or equipment that does not add value to the product or service, e.g. on-site support, meetings, location of supplies, access to unnecessary or poorly optimized information or documents.
• Inventory: It is related to storage of raw material or product in process or finished, which exceeds what is necessary to meet the customer’s needs.
• Motion: It is related to transport, unnecessary movement of material or equipment.
• Waiting: It is related to any downtime that occurs between the activities of a product and/or service development. For example: an equipment failure, different speed between processes, authorization from one or more responsible, etc.
• Overproduction: It is related to produce more than necessary, earlier than required or at a faster rate than required by the process or the end customer.
• Over-processing: It is related to a series of steps or documents required to complete an activity. For example: unanalyzed reports, countless approvals.
• Defects: It is related to any incorrect information, products or services, due to lack of supervision, low-quality materials, insufficient training or rapid manufacturing.