When we talk about 7 waste mentioned in TPS, many peoples may think this is only applicable in production system. Nothing much to do with activities carries out in the office. However, I m trying to relate the wastes in our daily office activities, and lets see how the waste affect individual’s efficiency.
Over production: do you ever experience report was rejected by your boss due to too much of irrelevant info that he don’t want? You may feel very upset because your hard work was not recognized.
It is an example of over production. Yes, you may put in a lot of effort to prepare a document that you “think” your boss will like it, but actually not.
We end up in this kind of situation mainly because we don’t understand the need of our customer. To avoid this happen again, try to understand precisely your customer’s need by asking their expectation and only deliver what they ask for.
Waiting: I have seen peoples who like to work on multiple assignments at the same time. They busy on everything, but end up nothing happen. All the WIP were keep one side, pending for completion.
To avoid this happen, make sure you understand your own capacity and capability. Take up reasonable work load and only kick start new assignment when WIP on hand reaching finishing stage.
Transportation: We can’t avoid walking around the whole organization to meet up with colleague for business activities especially for those working in a big organization.
Take me as an example, the distance between my office and the production floor is about 10 minute walking. Can you imagine how I feel when I notice I left out something in the office when I m in the production floor or someone call me back to office for unplanned meeting. To avoid unnecessary walk, I really plan my trip to production floor.
Inappropriate process: may be too much influence by the shortcut in computer, we like to take the advantage of shortcut to find easy way out. We don’t properly follow procedure in many circumstances. End up a task was rejected or cannot be complete on time due to incomplete information. Your time wasted, the person who process your application also wasted.
So, follow procedure please.
Excess of inventory: If we treat the incoming assignments as the raw material pending for value add process. We should consume the material as fast as possible to keep the inventory level low. We don’t really do that, whereas we like to keep the assignment in the drawer. The longer we keep, the heavier the work load, the situation become worst when more and more raw material come to its expiry date where we need to work extra hard to consume before the dead line.
Why keep? Why can’t just pick it up, process it and pass it to the next process operation in the shortest time?
Unnecessary motion: To me, “Tai Chi” is a kind of unnecessary motion in the work place. I believe all of us hate the work place Tai Chi masters who like to push away responsibilities that come to them. These groups of peoples are really creative, they can tell you all kind of reason, or ask all kind of question to make you blur and push back the assignment to you.
In many occasions, time taken to ding dong with the Tai Chi master could be many time longer than the actual process cycle time suppose to take for completing the assignment. I had an experience where I took about a month to ding dong with a Tai Chi master for getting help from his department to fix the problematic process equipment. Finally, I win the game and he gives instruction to his technician to work on the machine. The joke is, the technician took only 4 hour to get the problem fixed.
Please lah, if you call yourself a professional, act like a professional please.
Defect: Do it right at the first time. If you need help, voice up as soon as possible. Don’t keep and continue produce defect. No point giving thousand of excuse or future corrective action after mess up the whole situation.
You can be more efficient if you willing to list down all the waste you create everyday, take necessary action to remove it from your habit.
