LEAN on my MIND!

   As soon as you hear the word, one thing instantly comes to the mind, lose the fat! Well, as much as we would love to talk about health and benefits of losing weight and becoming fit, today’s article is all of these things however, for an organisation. Surprised? Read on.

 

So LEAN though usually used in the context of losing weight, more and more businesses are adopting the model as well. So how is it being done? Firstly let’s understand why it is being done. So when we say companies are adopting LEAN, it means that they want to lose the excess weight, i.e. the extra bits they are carrying. This extra bit can be denoted as Waste!

 

So what is this waste that the companies are trying to reduce? Let’s call it “TIMWOOD”. Obviously you would have guessed it already that TIMWOOD is an acronym we use to remember the different types of waste that the companies try to reduce. So the TIMWOOD stands for Transport, Inventory, Movement, Waiting, Overprocess, Overproduce and Defect.

 

The first type of waste that the companies try to reduce is transport wherein unnecessary movement of products, equipment, and people are reduced since unwanted transport results in time wasted and materials may also get damaged.

 

The next one is Inventory wherein the company tries to reduce the amount of inventory since extra inventory results into damaged or defected products, which also results in inefficient use of capital. This would also mean waste of storage space and utilizing extra resources when not required.

 

Then comes Motion/movement, wherein unnecessary motion results in waste of time, efforts and resources. Therefore let’s say if the product has to move from point A to B, it makes sense that it goes straight from A to B rather than A to C to E to G to B.

 

The next waste is Waiting, is quite similar to motion, wherein if the there is any waiting by any of the participants of production, it results in waste of capital, time, efforts. So let’s say if workers need to wait on material or when production is halted for unexpected equipment maintenance, this leads to waste of capital that is invested.

 

Overproduction like in unwanted inventory results when production is more than demand. Again the resources get held up resulting into waste to the company.

 

Overprocessing is when the company puts in the product than the customer wants. Imagine you want a simple phone however it has 100+ features which customers don’t  find its helpful. Therefore company should eliminate any tasks or a process that is not useful or necessary to those requirements.

 

Last but not the least is the Defects, i.e. products that do not meet the required standards. It could be quality, features, specifications, etc. This is probably the worst of the waste and company should try to reduce it asap.

 

So guys as you can see, the companies would want to become LEAN as much as possible. Its healthy for the company and beneficial for investors, like how LEAN in your weight management could be.