Welcome to Chapter 2 of our 8-part ‘Eliminating Waste with Lean’ series, dissecting ‘overproduction waste’. You can read this series in any order, however, we suggest reading Chapter 1 after this blog, which covers key insights on defect waste.
Before we jump in, let’s recap why we care about waste.
“Waste has a way of hiding in plain sight. It is rarely ever apparent that waste is happening because you don’t have work processes that you do just for the sake of doing. Waste hides in the gaps between the essential steps, adding up over time. And it will stay there, sucking up your resources, unless you know how to spot it and stop it.
You may already know that your processes could be improved, but you don’t know what needs fixing or the fix. At Adastra, we help our clients identify where non-value-adding steps or processes are taking place through the use of lean tools such as value stream mapping. From there, we can put an appropriate plan together to tackle waste and encourage continuous improvement to ensure the non-value-added tasks (waste) do not happen again.
This is one of the fundamental basics of lean thinking – reducing waste to be able to run your business as efficiently (leanly) and profitably as possible and provide ultimate value for money for your customers.” – Chapter 1 – Defects
Simply put, we care about waste because it does not add value and takes up businesses’ time and money.
To eliminate waste, you must be able to identify it. In this chapter, we will dissect non-value-adding tasks in overproduction to help you identify & eliminate these issues in your workflows.
Chapter 2 – Overproduction Waste
Overproduction is precisely what it sounds like – producing more than the customer needs or wants or producing it sooner than the customer wants.
Do not be mistaken – the definition may sound simple, but the effects of overproduction can be disastrous. Overproduction is considered the worst type of waste because it can be very costly, reduces overall quality, and contributes to other types of waste, such as inventory and transport.
When you hear ‘overproduction,’ your mind probably imagines a manufacturing production line, but overproduction happens in any industry.
Overproduction Examples
Office Environment
Overproduction in an office environment can take many forms. For example, producing reports that no one reads or needs wastes staff time and resources, not to mention the energy used to send the reports. Stop sending non-value-adding reports that reduce the quality of your work. Send reports only when they provide value.
Another example could be making extra copies just in case – this wastes paper and energy to print extra copies and will take up unnecessary storage space.
Other overproduction examples in an office include:
- Entering repetitive information on multiple documents
- Excessive memos or emails to everyone
- Extra anything takes up valuable office space and wastes raw materials – paper, attention, etc.
Customer Service
Overproduction can even happen in a call centre or customer service department.
For example, attempting to sell other services or products before the customer is happy with the first service can make them angry, maybe even cancel or leave a bad review.
Sales
Working in sales? Excessive documentation and reviewing are two overproduction tasks we see happening regularly.
Ask yourself: Is there value or a point in everything you have written down or documented? Are you reviewing proposals or quotes before they are ready to send out? Time is money. Don’t waste your time doing unnecessary things.
Medical Industry
Examples of overproduction in the medical field include unnecessary diagnostic procedures or additional tests that could be avoided.
The time spent by all those involved is wasted (patients, nurses, doctors, etc.), and the materials needed to run the diagnostics or tests are wasted.
Tests performed too early are another example of overproduction. For example, requesting bloodwork when a medication has not had time to fight the disease. Again, time and materials are wasted, and you will need to rerun the tests in the future!
IT Departments
Excessive emails, reports, and system alerts that are not read or acted upon are examples of overproduction in IT.
The apparent waste is the time and effort put into sending each message, but the real problem is that crucial updates get lost in the noise, causing more significant issues. Don’t let this real-life example of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ happen to your business!
Digital Solutions
Overproduction can easily happen in the digital world.
When designing a new website or online tool, a company may spend time creating features that nobody uses – what was the point? You have wasted the investment funds and time wasted to remove the feature so it does not cause consumers issues.
Like other industries we have discussed, another typical overproduction waste we have observed with our digital clients is creating reports that nobody reads and emails sent to everyone instead of relevant people.
Legal Firm
Our last example looks at a law firm. Examples of overproduction in this type of industry include:
- Too many people involved in meetings
- Duplication of existing documents
- Printing too much
- To many communications
As you can see, overproduction waste is not only happening in manufacturing industries. Apply lean principles to any industry to reduce overproduction waste and improve operations.
Overproduction Effects on the Environment
If you are overproducing, you are making more than what you need. Not only are you wasting resources, be that human effort, energy, or raw materials, but you are creating more pollution than you have to.
Avoid overproduction by using lean principles to run your business as efficiently (lean) as possible. Reducing overproduction means you will have less time and resources wasted in every area of your business, finally reducing how much pollution you contribute.
If you are working towards becoming a more sustainable business and want to reduce your carbon footprint, lean management will help you.
The Solution to Eliminating Overproduction
The ideology of lean is to continuously maximise value to customers by reducing waste. We mentioned it at the beginning of this blog, but the key to eliminating overproduction waste is identifying it. Once you know what it is you need to eliminate, you can understand why it is happening and how to stop it.
Adastra consultants conduct waste analysis for our clients regularly. Please don’t hesitate to contact us; we would love to help.
Next up in this series? Chapter 3 – Waiting.
