How to do the MUDA Walk
Lean Manufacturing identifies 8-types of waste. These wastes in lean terms are called MUDA, a Japanese word meaning "wasteful". A MUDA walk is when you walk around your factory looking for these wastes. When you implement lean manufacturing in your plant you are accepting the challenge of eliminating these eight wastes from negatively impacting your factory's performance. When you eliminate these wastes, you will absolutely experience improved results in all of your plant's KPI's.
Do a MUDA walk alone or with a team, look for these wastes and make plans to reduce and eliminate them:
- Transport – Minimize the distance that your products travel within the factory. You can do this by moving materials closer to the point of use. Also consider moving your main processes closer together to minimize the distance that your work-in-progress (WIP) needs to travel. Focus on your highest volume products and get those processes in-line and in close proximity to each other. This create product velocity and reduces transport waste!
- Inventory – Inventory costs a lot of money – it’s tying up cash that can be used for other things like purchasing new equipment. Additionally, paying for all of that storage space is expensive too. Imagine that your big warehouse is now production space. Wouldn't that be great! Of course you will want to reduce inventories without impacting your customer delivery commitments and lean has an excellent tool for doing this. It's called a Kanban. A Kanban is a great tool that reduces inventory while maintaining or improving customer on-time-delivery percentage.
- Motion – Minimize the amount of movement your operators need to make. Their time is money so use their time wisely. Watch your operators' movements and track the time that they walk away from their process. Every time they walk away presents an opportunity to move something closer. Video recording an operator's work station is a great way to capture their movements. Keep the camera stationary while recording. When the operator moves from the camera view - it begs the question...where did they go? ..and can you move something closer to that point of use? Minimizing operator movement reduces costs, improves efficiency and improves task ergonomics.
- Waiting – We all know that waiting for the traffic to move on the freeway is a waste of our time. So time spent waiting in a factory is a waste too. Level-loading work-flows by doing time studies and reassigning tasks can eliminate wait time, increases productivity and improves the product velocity through your factory. The faster that product moves through the factory, the lower the factory costs become.
- Overproduction – Producing too much product creates inventory and it puts the extra product at risk for damage, going stale or going obsolete. So you never want to overproduce products. Producing products "just in case" is anti-lean. Instead of creating safety nets via inventory builds, reduce MUDA and only produce what your customer orders. Streamline and create velocity for optimal factory performance!
- Overprocessing – If we have to overwork or rework product to get it to meet the customers expectation then that is a waste. I've seen some operations that design rework stations into their factories. Root cause and corrective action steps can reduce and eliminate this situation.
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Defects – Quality issues require that QA resources be used for the evaluation and disposition of the product. This takes time and if the product is scrap then that costs addition money. Quality systems should be built into your processes preventing defects before they occur. Six-sigma methodology is a great approach to reduce and eliminate product defects.
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Unutilized talent – Employees are very talented. Not using that talent everyday to help thrill the customer is a total waste. Unfortunately, the culture at some plants requires operators to put their brains in a jar when they enter the factory. AKA - "We don't want your opinion, just do your job!" Instead of shutting employees out of decision-making and problem-solving activities, you want to engage your employees. Ask them to bring their hearts, minds and bodies to work and engage them in activities that will help you to improve your business!
Now that you know the 8-types of waste that lean manufacturing seeks to eliminate, you want to use Kaizen events to attacked these wastes. Implement Kanbans, Single Piece Flow, SMED, 5S, Process Capability Studies and other Lean/Sigma tools and you will be rockin' all of your KPI's. Be a Lean Rock Star!
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