The 7 Wastes

Yesterday I talked about the disconnect between recruiting’s perception of hiring manager satisfaction and the buyer’s perception of success. I thought this was an important note to start with, because the disconnect starts around the concept of quality (the parties are working to different outcome specifications).

The concept of quality is at the center of my concept of Talentism. Business is very careful about the terms and concepts it uses to evaluate the quality of a money transaction, but it is very loose and careless about the terms and concepts it uses to describe the quality of talent transactions. When we start to apply more rigor towards a systematized approach to describing talent and its value to investors, we will start to be able to compete with the “money is more important than people” group-think that is at the heart of a lot of bad business decisions. Talking about quality is the first step towards this systemized approach to value evaluation in talent markets. That is why I have written about it here and here and here.

In those posts I have talked about the need for a rigorous specification, and the need to have behavioral and output-focused measurements of whether someone meets the specification. Rigorous specification is one of the pillars of quality. Put another way: if you can’t define exactly what you expect you can’t claim what you get isn’t good. Rigorous specification, as well as any subsequent assessment against that specification, is the starting point to understanding process quality. Yet this approach leaves out an entire pillar of quality that is extremely important in the evaluation of a system's efficiency and effectiveness: lack of waste.

The Japanese have a word to describe an activity or outcome that does not provide value: muda. Roughly translated, it means “waste.”

Lean Manufacturing and Just in Time (JIT) delivery were developed and popularized by Toy ota (I spell it this way so that this dippy HTML conversation tool that I use converts it correctly - what a pain). Toy ota’s objective was to lower costs and increase market share. Like all great innovations, it started with the basic premise that you could have two seemingly incompatible objectives achieved by the same tool. Before the Deming / Juran revolution, which is embodied in LM and JIT, you could have either a good product or a cheap product, but not both. Toy ota saw past that artificial demarcation and demanded popular, high-quality and inexpensive products. Or, put another way, Toy ota wanted to grow both the top and bottom lines.

Taiichi Ohno, Toy ota’s Chief Engineer for many years, was the innovator at the heart of the Toy ota quality system. He developed an idea called “The Seven Wastes.” The idea is that anything that does not benefit the customer is a waste. The objective of all Toy ota quality programs was to reduce waste first as the first step to achieve quality. Of course you can't define what is wasteful unless you have a definition of what is good, so specification is still a critical component in reaching reduction in waste targets.

The Seven Wastes are:

1 - The Waste of Overproduction

2 - The Waste of Waiting

3 - The Waste of Transporting

4 - The Waste of Inappropriate Processing

5 - The Waste of Unnecessary Inventory

6 - The Waste of Unnecessary Motions

7 - The Waste of Defects

People selecting and deploying technology must first start with the objective of the optimization of the overall system. You cannot achieve this optimization without first reducing waste, regardless of the relative value of the information that is contained within the system.

This is one of the better articles I have read on the subject.

If you have a spare couple of hours it might be worth the read. It would be great to get Dubs-Dubs take on how enterprise systems that often create waste for the purpose of supporting their own ecosystems would answer the issues raised in this paper.

Comments

[Double Dubs]

Jeff:

This post (click my name to view) turned out a bit different than I imagined it. Thanks for inviting me to discuss. I think some things came out of my head that I didn't even know were in there. I'm still not sure I answered your question, but I might give it another shot in the next week. Happy posting!!!

[haggag]

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