What we're going to do now is just go through that simple improvement process in a very simple step by step way. So we're going to look at each of those steps in detail. And of course, we'll start with reason why. So why should you change something in the first place? Well, there's some pretty obvious reasons why you might want to change something. And here are some of them.

Maybe you need to improve customer service. Maybe you need to increase your margin with your products or services. Maybe you're trying to decrease material waste, if you check away, decrease energy usage, increased levels of efficiency, increased productivity, remove wasteful effort that people have to do increase the amount of value that people add. So all of those would be good reasons to do something. And we're going to look at this from a lean perspective. So we're going to focus on those wastes that we Talking about before.

Now, there's either seven or eight ways to depending on who you want to believe for, we're going to talk about eight. So we're going to give you the eight. But really there these are things that we would consider are activities or outcomes of activities that we'd want to try to avoid. So what are these eight ways? Well, one way to remember is to remember quite a famous individual nowadays in the world of lean call Tim woods, or Tim wood if you just say the seven ways. So what are the eight ways?

Well, Tim Woods obviously is an acronym again, and it stands for transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction over processing defects and skills is an odd sounding one, but it's the under utilization of skills is the the eighth waste that some people talk about. We're going to look at those in a bit more detail now. But remember, these are all good reasons to do something. So these are all good reasons to initiate a business improvement project using lean, or other techniques. So we're going to do now is just have a look at these eight ways, in a bit more detail step by step, and we'll have a look at how they apply or can apply to you and your business. The first one we're going to talk about is transport waste.

Well, that could be applying to lorries and vans and trucks and things but not necessarily. So when we work with manufacturing organizations often, transport is around just moving stuff around the factory, or from the warehouse to the factory, or going and getting materials and all the waste that's involved with that. So it's really trying to reduce as much of that as possible anytime that you're just moving from one place to another with a pallet or going to fetch something that is considered to be true. Transport waste. If you add that time up, that can actually add up to quite a lot of time. So transport is really moving stuff around.

So that applies to a factory, but it can apply to an office as well. So in office situations, if you find that you're constantly having to go to a different office or floor to pick up your printing, or even it can apply to data. So if you're moving a lot of data around, then the the act of doing that can be introducing waste into your processes. So transport is considered to be waste, you want to eliminate as much of that as possible. So the second type of waste we're going to talk about is inventory. So inventory of course means keeping large stocks of either raw materials, work in progress or even finished goods.

So it took us quite a long time in in manufacturing particularly to work out that actually keeping large stocks was not a good idea for While it seemed sensible to have a lot of stocks, because it meant we could be quite flexible to what the customer wanted. But the problem is it, it creates a lot of expense. So not only is a lot of money tied up in keeping lots of stock, but it also means that we have to count it, we have to keep it, we have to look after it. We have to move it out the way because it's in the way of other things that we need. And also, of course, it can increase the amount of transport because you're having to move stuff around. We work a lot in the food industry.

And of course in that industry, a lot of your raw material. Stocks are perishable. So they will go out of life. So you have a real concern that you might waste literally waste materials and D that happens things are thrown away. And of course that could apply does apply to the catering industry to restaurants and so and so all of those areas would have to be thought about carefully so you end up stock rotation which in itself is quite an expensive activity. So you can see how a lot of activity is tied up with keeping large amounts of stock.

So you try to reduce that as much as possible. Another type of waste is called motion. So we've already looked at transport, which is really moving stuff around. Motion is more about moving people around, or people moving around. So this is really where people have to move around to do different jobs, go over there to do something over here to do something. Or it could even be just within the work area that they're working having to reach for something reached down, move across here, a couple of steps, add all that time up.

And it actually can can be quite considerable. You've got lots of people doing that. So really, you're trying to reduce motion. And a good way of thinking about this is to reduce effort. So we want to reduce as much effort as possible to produce the finished product. Waiting is another type of waste.

So anything that you're waiting for really hanging around for people, materials, breakdowns, if you're using machinery and equipment, waiting for permission to get the go ahead to do something, indeed, anything. So in different industries, it'll be different. And we did some work recently in District Council, and making sure things got signed off was quite a big waste area for those people in manufacturing, it's often hanging around waiting for workers to come in and start to, to do something on the line or it could be breakdowns. So that's a big problem when working in manufacturing, so anything that you're having to wait for anytime that you're waiting, that's that's obviously waste. If you've got a lot of people involved because it can be massively expensive. If you've got 5060 people hanging around waiting because of machines broken down, massive waste that you're trying to reach.

Use as much waiting as possible. Another type of waste is over processing. So what's over processing? Well simply put, it just simply means doing more than you need to, to the product. It could be doing it twice, or it could be making it even better than the customer is paying for. So we have to be slightly careful with that one because it's often good to delight our customers and so on.

But if we do that to to a greater degree, then we find that we're massively increasing the specification of our product, or as you're not getting paid for that. So we really need to be delivering what the customer is willing to pay for. And when we go over that if we choose to do so, because we want to delight our customers, Well, okay, we're making a reasoned decision there. But if we're doing that accidentally, then that would be considered as waste. Doing it twice would be where you might double handle something. So again, In a manufacturing situation, it could be where you find that you do something to the product, you hand it on to somebody else.

And they do something else with that product where actually, you could have done both of those things. So you're trying to reduce the amount of handling that the product gets. Within a warehouse. If you're handling stocks, pallets, moving stuff, they're moving stuff, they're moving it again, moving out of the way, again, you're really over processing, so you're doing more than you need to do to it. So it's really anytime that you're doing more than you need to do within an office situation. It might be that you find that you have to do loads and loads of checks.

Maybe you have to fill the report out twice or put the same data in twice or three times. Anybody that's had to fill out forms will notice how irritating that is. When you fill in some detail once you then do it again at another place in the form and you do it another place again in the form so you might be feeling the same information into twice or three times. If you're doing that in a work situation, of course, that's over processing its waste, you want to avoid it. Another type of waste is overproduction. And that's kind of speaks for itself.

Really, it's making more than the customers willing to pay for. There are a few businesses that we work with where unbelievably, the customer will actually pay them, even if they produce more than they asked for, but not many. So in most business situations the customer is willing to pay for however many they've asked for, or the service they've asked for. They won't pay you more if you go above and beyond. Now, again, you might decide to do that because you want to have good customer service. But you need to do that with knowledge and not accidentally.

And the D stands for defects, which again is fairly obvious what that means. It's either producing faulty goods or faulty services. Now the problem with defects of course is that It just compounds the amount of waste. So you've got some material waste there. If you produce it as a faulty good, and you also get customer complaints, you may find that you produce something and you can rework it. Of course, then you're double handling because you're reworking.

So then you've got waste upon waste, really, of course that applies to manufacturing. If you're in, let's say, the building trade or something like that, and every time you have to go back to your customer to do some snagging, for instance, that's waste. So think about the amount of waste that you're creating by having to go back and do snagging because you didn't get it right the first time. Now, of course, we might say, well, that's always going to happen, possibly, but the more you can reduce that, the more you reduce waste. And the final, the eighth waste, if you like, is the under utilization of the skills of your people. So as I mentioned in the introduction, this is a bit controversial in that not Everybody agrees this should be one of the wastes in lean.

And but it's there's no harm in talking about it. So if you think about your workforce, either in your office or your warehouse, you're out in the field, wherever you happen to be operating, if you think about those people working for you, are you using their skills and abilities to the potential that they have? Or are you kind of under utilizing them? So that fits quite nicely into thinking about, well, how do we make sure that we get the best out of our people, and we utilize them to the fall. So perhaps an example of that might be in your office, you might have a lot of people who struggle with it, maybe struggle to know how to do things within the software packages that you've got. But you may have other people in your office who are actually really good in that area.

And they could be training and supporting and coaching people within their team. And I know some businesses that do that, but some businesses don't. And then the strange thing is they probably A lot of money going and training somebody to to learn how to use Microsoft Project or word or something. And there's people within the team who know how to do that. And indeed could learn how to trade. So there may well be skills and knowledge within your teams that you're not utilizing.

And often, it's really just about getting to know them, and identifying some of those hidden talents that they may have. So let's just refresh our memory where we got to, we're on the very first step really about simple improvement process. And we certainly wanted to understand the reason why why would you change something? We've looked at those eight ways. And in terms of those eight ways, you could think about it as having two flavors and the two flavors are, there's either towards or away from. So all of those ways that we've identified you could say, well, either we've got a terrible problem with that it's costing is hundreds of thousands of pounds or it's costing us our customers.

We have complaints because of what we're doing wrong. And that you could see that as an away from motivator, do you know why we don't get our act together, we're going to have some serious problems, or we're hemorrhaging money, we can't afford it. We need to improve our efficiencies. These would all be good away from motivators, we've got to do something about this. Otherwise we're in trouble towards motivators would be in a situation where you might have things under control, you're actually doing a pretty good job. But you've identified that you could maybe increase your margins if you did some sensible things around lean.

So this is more of a a towards motivator, what could we do to improve our business still further. And that's a really good way to look at lean. So it's not just when you've got a burning deck to use that horrible phrase. It's also when you're doing okay, how could we do better? What can we do to improve the situation still further, so those are the two flavors of reason why? So let's just have a look at wearable We've got up to, we've looked at the reasons why and we've identified Tim Woods as a good way to identify waste within our processes that we might want to do something about.

We're going to next look at our current state analysis.