- 8 Waste of lean manufacturing
Dasarathi G V
Director in Leanworx
Dasarathi has extensive experience in CNC programming, tooling, and managing shop floors. His expertise extends to the architecture, testing, and support of CAD/CAM, DNC, and Industry 4.0 systems.
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- Lean manufacturing, or Lean, is the systematic elimination of waste (‘Muda’) within a manufacturing system.
- Lean manufacturing is derived from the Toyota Production System.
- To understand the wastes of Lean, it is necessary to first understand what Lean is.
- A machine manufacturing system on Industry 4.0 can play a great role in reducing the 8 wastes of Lean manufacturing.
Waste in Lean Manufacturing
Lean manufacturing—originally developed from the Toyota Production System (TPS)—is all about doing more with less. It’s a way of thinking that focuses on identifying and eliminating non-value-adding activities from your production process. In Lean terms, these are known as wastes, or Muda.
Understanding and eliminating these 8 types of waste is the foundation of a leaner, more profitable, and sustainable manufacturing setup. And today, with Industry 4.0 technologies like Leanworx, manufacturers can track, analyze, and reduce these wastes more efficiently than ever before.
Example: if you are a job shop machining castings and supplying them to a customer, the customer is paying for machined castings with metallurgical quality and final machined dimensions matching his specifications. Anything directly contributing to this is value-adding, which is all processes directly involved in making the castings in your foundry and machining them. Non-value adding costs could be these:
– Machine breakdowns
– Spending money on cutting to 10 microns tolerance when the drawing specifies 20 microns
– Raw material, machining and indirect costs of rejected parts
– Getting castings with more raw material than necessary, and spending more time on machining
A downtime tracking system helps in measuring and reducing waste.
8 wastes of Lean
The original 7 wastes of lean manufacturing were developed as part of the Toyota Production System (TPS). This later became 8 wastes with the addition of non-utilized talent or skills when the Toyota Production System was adopted outside Japan.
The 8 wastes of lean manufacturing are:
1. Transport – moving products that are not actually required for a process
2. Inventory – all parts, work in process and finished parts not being processed
3. Motion – people or equipment moving or walking more than required for the process
4. Waiting – waiting for the next step in production
5. Overproduction – producing more than demand
6. Over processing – producing to higher accuracy, finish, etc. than required by customer
7. Defects – effort involved in inspecting and fixing defects
8. Skills underutilized – people’s skills are underutilized
1. Transport
What it is: Unnecessary movement of materials, components, or products between processes or storage areas.
Why it’s a problem: Every extra movement introduces risks—product damage, misplacement, and wasted time. It also adds indirect costs like forklift operation and labor.
Leanworx as the solution: With real-time data from Leanworx’s machine monitoring system, you can redesign shop floor layouts based on actual material flow, minimize unnecessary transport, and improve production scheduling to reduce interim movement.
2. Inventory
What it is: Raw materials, WIP (work-in-progress), or finished goods sitting idle.
Why it’s a problem: Inventory ties up capital and space. It hides inefficiencies like overproduction, rework, or breakdowns.
Leanworx as the solution: Leanworx helps you monitor process downtimes and cycle times, making it easier to balance supply with demand, streamline buffers, and implement Just-in-Time production.
3. Motion
What it is: Excess movement by people or equipment due to poor layout or disorganized workstations.
Why it’s a problem: It leads to fatigue, ergonomic issues, longer cycle times, and unnecessary wear and tear.
Leanworx as the solution: Use Leanworx data to analyze workstation-level performance, identify patterns of inefficiency, and optimize workcell layouts for minimal operator motion and maximum throughput.
4. Waiting
What it is: Idle time when machines or operators are waiting for the next step—due to material shortages, tool delays, or unbalanced workflows.
Why it’s a problem: Waiting is hidden downtime. You’re paying salaries, energy, and machine depreciation for zero output.
Leanworx as the solution: Leanworx’s downtime tracking system pinpoints delays, identifies their root causes (e.g., breakdowns, material delays), and provides actionable insights to reduce waiting time and increase line availability.
5. Overproduction
What it is: Producing more than what’s needed, sooner than needed.
Why it’s a problem: Overproduction leads to excess inventory, wasted resources, and poor cash flow.
Leanworx as the solution: Real-time production visibility through Leanworx ensures you manufacture to demand and quickly adapt to changing schedules, minimizing overproduction risks.
6. Over processing
What it is: Doing more than the customer requires—like tighter tolerances, excessive polishing, or unnecessary inspections.
Why it’s a problem: It wastes time, materials, and money without increasing product value.
Leanworx as the solution: By tracking cycle time deviations and production trends, Leanworx helps you align output precisely with customer requirements—no more, no less.
7. Defects
What it is: Products that are reworked or scrapped due to not meeting quality standards.
Why it’s a problem: Defects waste materials, time, and labor, and affect customer satisfaction.
Leanworx as the solution: With OEE monitoring and automated quality tracking, Leanworx helps reduce defects by identifying root causes early—whether it’s tool wear, operator error, or machine issues.
8. Non-utilized talent
What it is: Failing to leverage employees’ skills, ideas, or problem-solving capabilities.
Why it’s a problem: It results in missed improvement opportunities and lowers employee morale.
Leanworx as the solution: Leanworx empowers operators with performance data and enables team leads to act on insights, not assumptions—turning the shop floor into a continuous improvement engine.
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8 forms of waste in Lean Manufacturing and automated downtime tracking
To reduce waste, you need to know where it is occurring, and how much is occurring. For this you need a good system of acquiring information and reporting. This is what a downtime tracking system does. Machine monitoring and process monitoring is done 24/7, automatically, and you get data directly from processes and machines, accurately and instantly.
Wastes like machine downtimes, part rejections, extra processing can be identified, their quantum determined, and action taken to reduce or eliminate them.
Leanworx is a powerful OEE monitoring system. You can focus on the quantum of each waste in each process, and eliminate the wastes systematically.
How to reduce waste in lean manufacturing ?
In most shop floors, idle time on machines can be up to 40 %, and people think this is normal. Basically, these firms have bought a bunch of elephants to do their work, and the elephants are sleeping 40 % of the time. The problem is that even when they’re sleeping, the elephants have to be fed and their mahouts have to be paid their salaries. Wastes of lean can be low hanging or high hanging fruit, and fortunately, the low hanging fruit are very easy to pluck.
What does 40% downtime mean in terms of production and profitability ?
- Your ROI is straightaway reduced by 40 %.
- You are maybe producing 60 parts per shift when you could be producing 100.
- You have bought 10 machines when 6 would have been enough.
- Your prices are 40 % more, in the cut-throat market out there.
Some causes of idle time detected by machine downtime tracking software:
Low hanging fruit (can be fixed very quickly)
Work ethics problems:
Operator coming late at beginning of shift, taking more time than allotted for tea, lunch, dinner, etc. This can easily add up to 1 hour per shift, or 16 % of the available time.
Long time to attend to problems on machine
When there is a technical clarification or a machine breakdown, the operator goes in search of the supervisor or maintenance person to report the issue. The latter come when they are free, 10 or 15 minutes later.
High hanging fruit (can be fixed in the medium term)
System problems:
Here is an example of CNC setup time reduction can also give you big gains in profitability. Searching for things is another area. E.g., in a shop with VMCs where our Leanworx is used as the downtime tracking system, the reports showed that operators spent up to 15 minutes every shift ‘searching for tools’. The VMCs had a machine hour rate of Rs. 1000.
It turned out that each bay had one set of Allen keys, and when an operator required a key he went around all machines searching for it. If the keys were already in use on a machine, he had to wait till they were free. That’s a loss of 3 % of the available time, or Rs. 19,000 per VMC per month. The simple solution ? The firm just gave each operator a set of Allen keys costing Rs. 200, and saved Rs. 19,000 a month.
Breakdowns:
Breakdowns due to avoidable reasons, which can be fixed by simple and cheap preventive maintenance. The problem is that there are a hundred different causes of idle time, and you have no idea of them unless you are standing on the shop floor all the time. The problem worsens as the number of machines in the plant increases.
Numerous such small leakages add up to a big chunk of idle time every shift, and NOBODY notices. These become accepted practice, part of the system, absorbed into the culture of the shop, and everybody just says “Oh, that’s how we work here.”
Lean manufacturing model and 8 lean waste principles - how you can use them
Put in a machine downtime tracking software to measure wastes and reduce them. You will see your profits shoot up, and your investment on new machines drop. Leanworx is one such system that tracks machines in your shop floor 24/7 electronically, remotely. It works on Industry 4.0 design principles. Sitting at your desktop, from home, or wherever you are in the world, you can get reports on production quantity, idle times, part quality, OEE, rework, breakdowns, and other key statistics. You can get alerts on your mobile phone on any abnormal situations – production below target, rejections above limit, etc. The system dramatically speeds up your Lean and TPM implementation, and OEE improvement.
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