What is 7 Muda (Wastes)?

Reducing waste in order to bump up profitability is a no-brainer.  Waste is normally created in production process.  The principle of 7 wastes or known as muda was originated from Japan.  It was originally developed by Taiichi Ohno from Toyota as part of Lean project.


The seven muda are:
Defects
Quality defects usually resulted to rework or worst scrap.  These contributed to huge chunk of cost and effecting the production yield.  Cost included in defects are rescheduling for parts replacement, rework, re-inspection and delivery.  Defects reduction can be done through employee improvement projects.


Over-production
Over production mean manufacturing products even before order is received.  Over-production is done to build up stock in order to cover for scraps.  One ways to avoid this is by practicing the JIT or just in time which encourage the production of only what is demanded by customers.  This way company will be able to avoid storage and material cost. 


Waiting
Every time products sit on the storage mean waste due to waiting for delivery.  A lot of production lead time were tied up waiting for the next process, these process are called WIP and this take up storage.  This situation were caused by bad material flow or lack of resources.  This can be resolved by studying and improving the value stream mapping.


Non value process
Over engineer processes or high tech equipment to run a simple process could result to non- value process an inappropriate processing.  The cost to cover high amount of asset will eat into the bottom line.


Transportation
Delivery of products from point A to B could lead to unnecessary cost depends on the distance.  Material handlers normally hired to ensure continuous material supply to production floor, however the amount of time to do this will be costly, leading to expensive selling price.


Inventory
Work in process or WIP is the result of over-production and waiting time.  Excess inventory is costly specially when a company has a limited space to spare.  By doing value stream mapping,  excess inventory can be improved and eliminated altogether.


Motion 
When you watch process flow in manufacturing flow, you can normally see what might cause excess in motion through distance of parts from the operators. This also related to ergonomics, where the movement of operators need to be taken into consideration as some process could cause health hazard.

In a nut shell,  being lean doesn't mean cutting corners on quality but more on redesigning process or stream lining them to ensure smooth manufacturing flow.  This will lead to reducing or eliminating the above 7 muda and eventually add to profitability.