This document outlines eight types of waste that can occur in operations: overproduction, waiting time, transportation, inventory, processing, motion, product defects, and underutilization of people. It also shows ways to minimize waste such as reducing machine downtime, scrap, work queues, engineering design redundancies, inspection and decision backlogs, and identifying defective work earlier in the process.

1. Waste in Operations
1. Waste from overproduction
2. Waste of waiting time
3. Transportation waste
4. Inventory waste
5. Processing waste
6. Waste of motion
7. Waste from product defects
8. Underutilization of people

2. Minimizing Waste
Identifying defective
items from vendor
Machine
downtime earlier in the
production process
Scrap Vendor thereby saving the
Change
Work in
orders
work down cycle
process
queues Engineering design Design
(Factory Automation) redundancies backlogs
Identifying faulty work
Human Inspection Decision by employees in
Error backlogs backlogs upstream, thereby
saving downstream
work