8 Apr 2023
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TIMWOODS – The Waste in Your Organisation
A Powerful Way to Trigger Improvements – Identify TIMWOODS
Originally, there were 7 wastes that were described by Taiichi Ohno, the Chief Engineer at Toyota, as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS). Now, we talk about TIMWOODS with an eighth waste, waste of skills, knowledge, and experience of human resources.
- Transportation: the avoidable movement of goods, materials, equipment and people. Spaghetti diagrams may help to discover this type of waste.
- Manufacturing: Unnecessary movement of materials between processes (e.g., moving raw materials from one station to another without adding value).
- Service: Excessive travel required for service delivery (e.g., a technician driving long distances to service clients instead of planning geographically).
- 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.
- Manufacturing: Holding too much stock or raw materials (e.g., extra components sitting in a warehouse that are not needed immediately).
- Service: Over-accumulation of supplies (e.g., excessive office supplies that are rarely used but take up space).
- 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.
- Manufacturing: Inefficient movements by workers (e.g., a worker repeatedly walking to a far-off tool cabinet to retrieve tools).
- Service: Unnecessary movements in a service process (e.g., a customer service representative reaching across the desk for frequently used items).
- Waiting: the delay of processes due to late arrival of goods, services, information etc. A value-stream-map would highlight this kind of waste.
- Manufacturing: Idle time when workers wait for materials or equipment (e.g., supplies are not available or a machine being down, causing delays).
- Service: Clients or employees waiting for approvals or responses (e.g., a customer waiting for a refund approval for an extended period).
- 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.
- Manufacturing: Adding more features or steps than required (e.g., performing unnecessary quality checks).
- Service: Offering services beyond what customers require (e.g., providing extensive consultation when a simpler solution suffices).
- Overproduction: the production of more than customers require due to poor planning, incorrect forecasting, defective items or services, etc.
- Manufacturing: Producing more than what is needed (e.g., manufacturing excess units that exceed current demand).
- Service: Providing more services than needed (e.g., a restaurant preparing too many meals based on overestimated reservations).
- Defects: the production of goods or services that cannot be used or need to be repaired, replaced, reworked or reprocessed.
- Manufacturing: Producing faulty items (e.g., defective products needing rework or scrapping).
- Service: Errors in service delivery (e.g., an order being mixed up, leading to customer dissatisfaction and costly adjustments).
- 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.
Manufacturing: Lack of Skills: If workers are not adequately trained or skilled, it can lead to production errors, inefficient methods, and increased defects. For instance, an operator who lacks training may not use machines properly, resulting in wasted materials and time.
Service: Underutilisation of Skills: Employees may have skills that are not being effectively used in their current roles (e.g., a customer service representative with advanced problem-solving skills may only be handling basic inquiries, leading to wasted potential and missed opportunities for better customer experiences. This may also result in demotivation and attrition).
Many of these types of waste can be identified with process mapping methods.
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