Lean manufacturing examples?

Hi, Mike:

You mentioned that you've been able to identify four of the seven wastes in your facility. Then you list two you'd like to see examples of. What is the other waste that you have not been able to identify?

Unnecessary motion is a waste both in terms of human time and effort and a waste in terms of safety.

A time and effort waste example could be floor layout. Is the facility organized so as to minimize the amount of time and effort a person must exert to move at a work station, between work stations, or to move materials to or from interim or finishing locations?

A recent example I came across was a situation where a group of clerks were responsible for entering and processing online, email and fax orders that a company received from customers. Anything that came in by email or from the website was available right on the clerk's own computers. But, the fax machine was about 50 feet away on a wall next to where the fax line port was on the wall. Here was an example where the machine was placed at a convenient place because of where the fax connection was installed. No thought was given to where the people who received the documents from the fax were seated. The solution was either to move the fax or move the people. Because of an associated functional reorganization, the company moved the clerks to the fax machine. The estimate of waste was 9600 unneeded hikes to the fax machine per year for a total of 800 wasted manhours.

Just Google "motion waste" if you want to see examples and more explanations.

Examples of processing waste could be things such as:
- Having to manually clean dust or burrs from a piece during the manufacturing process
- Having to manually trim a piece because of worn out dies
- Inspections (most inspections are considered waste)
- Completing a step manually when it could be automated

And don't forget the other types of waste that often are not considered when thnking of the Seven types of waste:
- Counting activities
- Looking for tools or parts
- Multiple hand-offs
- Unnecessary approvals
- Machine breakdowns
- Sending bad products to customers

Also, do you measure first pass yield in your facility?