Practically every industrial engineer and floor manager is familiar with the seven wastes of lean manufacturing. While this theory was originally developed by Toyota as a way to control waste at their fabrication facilities, the theory can apply to nearly every production floor.
Employee time is one of the most expensive resources your company invests in. When production lines are ill-timed or maintenance delays employees from doing their jobs, those man hours can never be replaced.
Surplus production hurts your company’s profits in several ways. Firstly, the cost of extra materials and misuse of employee time cuts into your total profit. Secondly, overages have to be stored, entailing warehouse costs. Eventually, the product has to be sold. The surplus will increase the supply in a marketplace with low demand. This decreases the overall value of product on the market.
Damaged product is a waste of both materials and labor. As the piece is discarded or recycled, a company must incur the costs of these operations.
Many managers tend to think of over-processing as spending too much time on product fabrication, but in actuality this can also refer to added steps in the production process or excess material in a product’s design. While a product redesign can be part of the solution, it might not be practical. Therefore, it is advisable to evaluate each stage of fabrication for efficiency. APS software can run simulations to determine more efficient methods of production without running up the costs of experimentation on the factory floor.
While it is next to impossible to eliminate this cost entirely, there is a multitude of ways that companies waste resources during transportation. Inefficient schedules can result in trucks leaving one fabrication facility half-empty, while product in other facilities pile up in storage.
In this video, you’ll see how PlanetTogether Advanced Planning & Scheduling (APS) helps manufacturers apply lean manufacturing by targeting the classic 7 wastes—waiting, over-production, rejects, excess motion, over-processing, transportation, and inventory. Instead of relying on static factory schedules or spreadsheets, PlanetTogether APS uses real-time data and optimization to reduce non-value-added activities across the production floor.
You’ll learn how APS supports lean initiatives by:
– Identifying where waiting and idle time occur when production lines are ill-timed or maintenance delays employees from doing their jobs
– Reducing over-production and excess inventory by synchronizing schedules with demand, so you are not paying for material, labor, and storage you do not need
– Cutting rejects and rework through better sequencing and realistic loading of constrained resources
– Minimizing excess motion and over-processing by simulating different routing and setup options without experimenting on the factory floor
– Improving transportation efficiency by coordinating production and shipping so trucks and internal moves are better utilized
This video is ideal for factory schedulers, industrial engineers, and lean/CI leaders who want to move beyond lean theory and use APS-driven factory scheduling to systematically eliminate the seven wastes and improve throughput, lead time, and profitability.
Most manufacturers know the seven wastes of lean manufacturing—but fewer have a concrete way to remove them from their factory scheduling and day-to-day planning. Waiting, over-production, rejects, excess motion, over-processing, transportation inefficiencies, and excess inventory often hide inside the schedule itself: how work is sequenced, how resources are loaded, and how material moves through the plant.
Download our one-page “The Money Is in the Planning” infographic to see how advanced planning and scheduling can help you:
Share it with your operations, lean, and planning teams as a quick visual guide to where better planning and scheduling can remove the seven wastes and unlock additional capacity and profit.