TIMWOOD or TIMWOODS is an acronym that stands for the seven types of waste, i.e., activities the internal or external process customer would not be willing to pay for or wait for:
- Transport: the avoidable movement of goods, materials, equipment and people. Spaghetti diagrams may help to discover this type of waste.
- Inventory: the storage of goods, materials and equipment that results in costs for storage space, resources for handling and working capital. More often than not, working capital is actually not working but bringing down the cash flow.
- Motion: the avoidable movement of goods, materials, equipment or people that happens within your organisation whilst transport is often referred to external movement. Spaghetti diagrams may help to discover this type of waste.
- Waiting: the delay of processes due to late arrival of goods, services, information etc. A value-stream-map would highlight this kind of waste.
- Overprocessing: the processes that are unnecessary but done due to defects (repair, rework, replacement, …), missing trust (review, approval, …) or other reasons for doing work that the customer does not pay for.
- Overproduction: the production of more than customers require due to poor planning, incorrect forecasting, defective items or services, etc.
- Defects: the production of goods or services that cannot be used or need to be repaired, replaced or reprocessed.
- Skills: the deployment of human resources that does not make best use of their skills, knowledge and experience. Workforce deployment charts would highlight this kind of waste.
Many of these types of waste can be identified with process mapping methods.
