The Eight Wastes | Lean Principles | Ryan Tierney
Welcome to Lean Made Simple, a podcast about transforming your business — and life — one step at a time.
In this episode, Ryan Tierney from Seating Matters discusses “The Eight Wastes of Lean.”
Along the way, he and Producer Matt talk about:
Why waste isn't just the stuff that goes in the bin
How overproduction is "the mother of all wastes"
Getting called out by the former president of Lexus for having "muda”
The trap of organising your waste to make it look lean
Examples and stories that will help you see waste in your own organisation
And the biggest waste of all that nobody ever thinks about
Check it out!
Links:
Book a Lean Made Simple Tour: https://www.leanmadesimple.com/book-a-tour
Eight Wastes Print-Out from Seating Matters: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BYuPH-TYz2ghv8gwUNHahHDbZqszoTiY/view?usp=sharing
Send a voice message/question to the show: https://www.speakpipe.com/LeanMadeSimple
Welcome to Lean Made Simple: a podcast for people who want to change their business and their lives one step at a time. I’m Ryan Tierney from Seating Matters, a manufacturing company from Limavady, Northern Ireland that employs 60+ people. Almost ten years ago, I came across this thing called “lean” and it transformed my life… now I want to share this message with as many people as possible.
This podcast unpacks our learnings, lessons and principles developed over the last decade in a fun, conversational way that will hopefully empower you on your own business journey — whether you’ve been doing lean for years or are just starting out!
Check it out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other podcast platform by searching “lean made simple.”
Thanks and all the best.
— Ryan Tierney
Magic Moment 1: Focus on your defects and everything else will flow
Magic Moment 2: Overprocessing: Doing more work than the customer needs!
Magic Moment 3: The biggest waste of all
Full Transcription of Episode
LMS - The Eight Wastes
===
Ryan: People think waste is the physical stuff they see in the bin. But there's eight wastes and they're happening every single day in your company. And the first step is to know what they are
Intro
---
Ryan: Hello, and welcome to Lean Made Simple, a podcast for people who want to transform their business and their life one step at a time. My name is Ryan Tierney from a company called Seating Matters in Limavady in Northern Ireland.
I came across Lean about eight and a half years ago, and it's really changed the way I think about everything, and I'm really excited for the upcoming episode.
Matt: So Ryan, 8 Wastes in one episode. Why, why did you want to do that? Because you were really, really passionate about it and I'd love to share kind of that reason.
Ryan: I am really passionate about sharing this message because I have never yet seen a podcast or a video or anything that explains the eight wastes in such a simple, simple way.
Waste isn't the stuff that goes in the bin
---
Matt: There's a big misconception that people think waste is the physical stuff they see in the bin. We see it all the time when people come to visit us. They say, oh, we don't have any wastes. Alright, do you not? People don't understand that there's actually 8 wastes. And it was Toyota, that came up with these 8 wastes back, 80 something years ago. But these 8 wastes are present in every single business.
Ryan: It doesn't matter who listens to this podcast, whether you're a manufacturing company, a service organisation. It doesn't matter. There's these eight wastes and they're happening every single day in your company. And the first step to eliminating waste is to know what they are and to be able to see waste.
So the purpose of the podcast is for people to see waste like they've never seen it before. That's the purpose of today's podcast.
Matt: Brilliant. And we have a free, kindly supplied by Ryan and his team, we have a free printout of the eight wastes. If you want to click the link in the description, you can have them in front of you. Get your notebook and pen out as we go through each of these wastes, write down, oh yes, in my company, this is an example of waste here. Because if you can crack this, I think you're, you're absolutely flying whenever it comes to your lean journey. So will we do the first one? Overproduction. Tell me what it is.
1. Overproduction
---
Ryan: Yep, so the first waste and the mother of all wastes that it's also known as is overproduction.
I went to visit a company last week that invited me to go and see what their processes were like. A local company about 20 minutes away. As soon as I walked in the door, I could just see it,
their business is absolutely being crippled by overproduction. They're just making too much stuff.
And overproduction is basically where we make too much stuff or we buy too much stuff. And you know, we've all got a habit of doing it. We go into Tesco's and it's a buy one get one free. Even we don't need it, we overproduce. I don't know why we do it.
We inherently just want to, you know, bigger is better, buy more. If you buy more, you get a better discount or a better rate. And we overproduce so much stuff. And we have had loads of examples of this in the past at our company, where we've just bought too much stuff or made too much stuff. And it's the biggest waste. Overproduction.
2. Transportation
---
Matt: Crazy. So the second waste is transportation. Talk to me about that.
Ryan: Transportation is the movement of goods. So whether we like it or not, when we're moving something, we're not actually making something, we're not changing the product, we're not adding value.
And yes, you could argue that, well, I have to get it from here to here. Yes, you do. But how can you get it there more efficiently? A really good example we had, uh, about two years ago, a quarrying company came to visit us on a tour, and we explained, we were going through the wastes and talking about transportation, and the owner of the quarry company said, are you telling me that when we're transporting sand or gravel, around our quarry, like they have shovels driving from one side of the quarry to the other.
Are you saying that's waste? And we're like, absolutely it's waste. Nothing is changing. The product isn't changing. And they thought when they seen somebody driving a lorry, that yep, that guy's working. But he's actually his whole job is transportation, which is waste.
Matt: So one of the things that kept coming up in the comments of the value non-value episode was, yeah, yeah, but like, in the quarry example, the stuff has to be moved in a truck. You can't have a quarry business and the stuff just magically appears in front of the customer. So how do you kind of walk that line?
Ryan: Yeah, that is true and it's a good point. But we should always be thinking, how can we bring it closer? Is there a better way? Is there a more efficient way? Can we use a conveyor belt instead of a loading shovel?
it's trying to be creative and think outside the box. And that links to one of the other ways that we're going to talk about in a minute. There is a certain amount of necessary non-value. Yeah. But everything can be improved.
3. Inventory
---
Matt: So the third waste is inventory. Do you have like a story or an example of how this waste has played out for you?
Ryan: You know, we've been doing lean for 8 and a half years and we're still trying to understand and get our head around these wastes. And just 5 weeks ago we had the 2 second lean summit, right here at our company, and 220 people came from all over the world for a lean factory tour.
Everyone was going around taking photographs, taking videos. They couldn't believe what they were seeing. The organization, the cleanliness, the way the whole operation was running. But there was one guy from Japan, he was there on the trip, Mr. Amazawa. He was the former vice president of Lexus. And it was a real privilege to have him, uh, at the summit
and I thought, he's gonna really be impressed here. He's gonna, he's gonna really like what he's seeing.
Matt: Wait till you see see how our inventory is sorted here.
Ryan: Yeah, and we went up and showed him all the foam that we have for our product. You know, really nice cages, really nice bins, everything nicely organized, nice labels, the whole thing looked brilliant, it looked perfect, there was nice straight lines, and he walked over and he didn't speak for a second, and it was a bit awkward, and he said, Ryan, this is muda, make it disappear.
So muda is waste, Japanese for waste, this is waste, make it disappear. So, we were proud of how we had all our foam organized. We were proud of the bins, we were proud of the labels. The whole thing was nice and clean and organized. But it was excess inventory.
Matt: All you had done was make the waste look pretty.
Ryan: Yep, just organizing waste. Wow. We were organizing waste. And it was a big learning for us. So, whether we like it or not, anything that is more than what we need is excess inventory. And that's exactly what we have. And he was like, reduce it make it disappear. Only have the inventory that you need.
Matt: So how do you solve that? Because again, you obviously need inventory. Like you need foam to make your chairs. So what does, what does the solution look like?
Ryan: Yeah, it depends on your process, but excess inventory is more than you need. Which is something that's just as bad as having less. You know, we don't run out either.
It's just finding that balance. But we were too much on the wrong side of it. And we really had to bring that back.
Matt: Right, and then the waste comes from storing it. Now it's taken up. Now you need a bigger factory. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that sort of stuff.
Ryan: Exactly.
Matt: Okay. Interesting.
4. Defects
---
Matt: So, the fourth waste, defects. Is that in any way connected to inventory?
Ryan: It can be. Or it can be a standalone. But a defect is anything that isn't made right first time. We visited a company in Japan. They supply parts to Toyota. 100 million parts per year. How many defects do you think they had?
Matt: Like, thousands?
Ryan: 7. Like, 7 or 8. That's crazy. Absolutely crazy. You compare that with a company in the UK. You know, we're creating defects every single day. The goal of lean and the goal of operational efficiency is to reduce defects. If we reduce defects, everything in the business just gets better. So if there's one takeaway from this podcast, focus on your defects and focus on eliminating your defects and everything else will flow.
So defects are the source of a lot of waste that causes so much other wastes when we produce a defect.
Matt: Right, because if we get the camera angle wrong, I'm going to wave in front of you or wave in front of me. If we get that wrong, then there's a defect and we'll have to reshoot it. We'll have to do the whole thing. And that's mad, that's a huge amount of waste. If we had to do it all again,
Ryan: It is, yeah. Yeah. Crazy.
5. Motion
---
Matt: You have here the fifth waste is motion. How is that different to transportation?
Ryan: Yeah, so motion is the movement of people. Transportation is the movement of goods. So if I'm at a workstation at our factory, and I'm walking to get the drill, I'm walking to get the tools, I'm walking to ask what order we're working on next, this is all motion. It's anything that isn't adding value to the customer. When we're walking to look for stuff, is the product changing?
No, it's not. So how do we reduce that as much as possible? So that's where it gets into doing small kaizens, small improvements all the time to reduce motion. And it's one of the most engaging ways to motivate and inspire people when they're on their lean journey. Because motion is so visible. We can see it, like, after listening to this podcast, you'll be able to witness motion in action.
You know, people walking to get tools, walking to get materials, And that motion can be reduced dramatically by small improvements.
Matt: I was joking with you before, but Trevor, who was at the Lean Summit, he came and had a cup of tea with us in the studio just a few days afterwards and he was so leaned up, so ready, just seeing waste everywhere, waste goggles, you know, ultra magnified.
And I was making a cup of tea, and I think I went and I put something in the bin and then I went and got the teabag, dunked the teabag in, and then I went back to the bin again and he just went, MUDA! He says, that's motion waste, you've just gone back and forth. And I was like, you're 100 percent right.
That is, yeah. But if you're doing this, you know, if you've got a hundred employees, a thousand employees, more employees, and they're walking, you know, let's just say, like, three minutes more than they need to every single day. Yeah. That's massive.
Ryan: That is, yeah.
Matt: Okay. We're getting through these.
6. Over processing
---
Matt: This is good. Number six. Over processing. What do the people listening need to know about over processing?
Ryan: So over processing is doing more work than you need to do. More work than is necessary and we all do it. We do it all the time.
A good example we had four or five years ago, we used to wrap every single cushion for our product in plastic. So we wrapped it in plastic, taped it on, put a label on it, it looked really nice, presented it onto the chair and then wrapped the chair. But what's the first thing the customer done when they got the cushion?
They took the wrapping off again. So why did we wrap the cushion but we didn't wrap the arm? Why did we wrap the cushion but we didn't wrap the back? It's just somebody decided one day, you know, years before, that we need to wrap the cushions. And that habit just continued until we started to see the waste.
And we realized this is actually over processing at it's best. We're spending all this time wrapping the cushions. We're taping them on. We're buying all these different types of wrap. With this workstation set up for doing the process. And the customers were actually really annoyed because the first thing they had to do was take the wrapping off again.
So that's one of the early ones that we've done. It sounds like a simple thing, but we're doing hundreds of improvements like that all the time. And the accumulation of all these small wins add up to something massive. But that's a really good example of over processing, doing more than the customer needs.
Matt: Okay, so seventh waste is waiting. What does that mean?
7. Waiting
---
Ryan: Again, people think waste is the physical stuff that we see. And nobody would ever think of waiting as a waste, but it absolutely is one of the biggest wastes, is waiting. You know, internal customer and external customer. So if our external customer places an order for a chair or requests information, we have to get back to them as quick as we can to reduce waiting.
Because waiting is one of the biggest wastes. Waiting in between departments as well, if it goes from production to design to... You know, if we're getting a new product approved, that gap in between, we need to make that as short and as tight as possible. Because what we're really trying to do is create flow.
It's back to creating flow throughout the entire organization. The customer should request the quote, they get the quote, they place the order, we manufacture the product, we deliver it, the payment comes in, the whole thing flows from start to finish. But anywhere there's a stoppage or a blockage is waste. If there's something that's been sitting there ages and there's dust on top of it, it's a fair sign that something's waiting. So people wonder how I'm able to go into a factory or a production environment and spot all this waste, and it's so easy.
There's no big secret. I just look at something that's waiting. Wow. Why is that waiting? Why is that stopped? Because that should be flowing to the customer.
Matt: I think it was you that told me this. This is maybe another piece of advice the Japanese gave when they were over. Was it Mr. Amazawa or somebody said, you know, you should actually get your workers to just, when they're finished and they're waiting, to just do nothing to make it really obvious? Was that you?
Ryan: Exactly that, yeah. It was me, yeah. So one of the, the concepts that they teach in Toyota is to stop and wait when there's a defect. Because if we just keep working and leave it to the side and go on and make the next thing, it's not visible. But they're, they're trying to train people to stand up tall with their hands by their side and just wait.
Because it sends a signal to the team leader or to the production manager that hold on a minute, there's something wrong. That person is waiting. So waiting is one of the biggest wastes and it focuses our attention. When we see somebody waiting, or we see inventory waiting, or we see production waiting, or customers waiting on feedback, that's massive potential for improvement.
Matt: Wow. Yeah
8. Skills/Untapped Employee Genius
---
Matt: .
So the 8th waste, the final one, is a weird one. Skills.
Ryan: It's a weird one, but it's the biggest one and there's a reason that we've kept the best to last. This is the biggest waste in every organization. Again, we've said it a few times, people think waste is physical. It's the physical stuff that you can see.
The biggest waste in any organization is the waste of untapped employee genius. There's untapped potential in every single person in your organization. So why are we not asking them what they think? One of the biggest wastes is not using the creative ideas of your people. So we have 65 people using their brains everyday.
Their creative thinking, their brainstorming, they're coming up with ideas, they're coming up with improvements. Because the genius lies in each and every person within your organisation. They have the answers, they're the people doing the work. But why do we not ask them? And this is the biggest waste of all.
It's bigger than the other seven put together. The waste of untapped potential or the waste of employee genius.
Real-life example of all eight wastes in-action
---
Matt: So the way that you say you saved kind of like the biggest one for last, are these arranged in a particular order or why have you arranged them in this way?
Ryan: Yep, so
Matt: a really good example, that happened to us a few years ago with, uh, product brochures that we bought. This is an actual example. We thought, buy more, get a better discount.
Ryan: We ended up buying 19,000 product brochures because the price per unit was very good and it was attractive for us. So we over produced. We bought all these product brochures. And then it led on to the other 7 wastes which followed. So the next waste after over production is transportation. And whether we like it or not, when we're moving something from one place to the other, the product isn't changing.
We're not adding value to that customer. So that process is waste. So we overproduced, then we had to transport the product brochures. We moved them up to a different part of the factory. Then we moved them again because we needed the space. They were transported around three different places.
We had to put up pallet racking. So then the third waste was inventory. The product brochures sat in inventory. So we overproduced, then we transported it, and now we've got inventory. We've got this huge amount of capital. A lot of money sitting on the shelf. And this is what actually happened. We had a leak in the roof and the product brochures got defected, which is the fourth waste defects.
So we had to go around and, you know, rework all these product brochures, throw some of them in the bin, we had to recycle some of them. We were spending all this time managing this process because of a defect, which is the fifth waste, is motion. So we're running around doing all this work that we didn't really need to do.
So it's motion and it's over processing. And this all, just to remind people, this all started because we bought too much stuff. Meanwhile, what is our customer doing? While 3 or 4 of our really high level experienced employees are managing a defect over processing these brochures, the customer's ultimately waiting.
Which leads us on to the 8th waste of all. The waste of skills. So that's a quick run through of how the eight wastes all link together, but it always nearly always starts with overproduction.
Matt: And, like, the fact that, like, you can print this off, you have it in your office, you have it in your factory, and you can blow this up.
Don't memorise the eight wastes, internalise them
---
Matt: Like, you have the 8 Wastes massive in your morning meeting room, don't you?
Ryan: Yeah. We have it in our morning meeting area, but where we have it stored, more importantly, is in the minds of every single person.
Because what we don't have is an acronym on the wall. Like, you've seen Tim Woods, T I M W O O D S with all the wastes. If you don't remember the wastes without looking at an acronym, then you don't get it. You need to feel the waste... You need to understand it at a level where you can't unsee it. So I can't go anywhere without seeing waste. It's good and bad because you just want to improve everything. But the waste is surrounding us all the time percent or 95 percent of everything we do is waste, and a tiny, tiny bit is value, whether we realize that is another thing, but it's true. So there's so much potential for improvement.
If you can listen to this podcast and internalize how much waste there actually is out there, it will blow your mind. But it's exciting. Turn frustration into fascination. Yeah. You know, be fascinated by the amount of improvement or opportunity there is. Don't get disheartened by the amount of waste that you have.
How to get started
---
Matt: Yeah, so kind of on that point, like for people listening or watching, how can we get started with all this?
Ryan: Yep, the best way is just to keep listening to this podcast a couple of times and understand that anything that doesn't add value to the customer is waste. Just start being, as Paul Akers says, big eyes and big ears.
Start looking out for it. Because if I said right now, look for everything in this room that's red.
You know, that mic's red, that cable's red, there's a box over there that's red. So we're just focusing on red, red, red, red. We're focusing on red. So, waste is the same.
How can we identify waste if we don't see it? So first we need to see waste. Know what waste is, and see waste. Don't even worry about eliminating it, or doing anything about it. The goal of this podcast is for people to see waste. Mm-hmm. And once you see it, you can't unsee it like red. When you focus on something, all you see is, is that color.
When we focus on saying waste, that's all you're gonna see.
Tour
---
Matt: That's class man. We are going to be, uh, I was going to say until the next time you come in, but probably like forever and ever and ever you have now ruined our lives. Where you've slapped waste goggles on our face and we're not going to be able to look at our business the same way.
We will definitely go over these as a team. And, uh, I know that the people listening as well will get a lot from listening to this episode and also printing it out, sticking it on the wall, blowing it up big and, and having it, you know, on the wall of the factory just like it is at Seating Matters.
And actually, there's a little accidental good transition. If you and your team would like to come and see Lean in action, see it for yourself. Get those waste goggles tightened up, get them refined, get them magnified. There's no better place to do it than Seating Matters. And you can do so by clicking the link in the description And I know that Ryan and the team would be really excited to have you along and show you what the results of their Lean journey have been.
Ryan: Yep, and when I said earlier that every single person knows and understands the wastes that's what you're going to see when you come on a tour. Every single person at our company knows these off by heart. They don't have to read it from a list, so, it's really powerful, yeah.
Matt: Well, we better get memorising. Ryan, thank you so much for your time, really appreciate it.
Ryan: Brilliant, thanks.