Waste of Transport; causes, examples, solutions

The waste of Transport

Transport is one of the eight wastes of lean manufacturing (muda); it is the
movement of products from one location to another. This could be from the
machining shop to the welding shop, or from the production facility in china to
the assembly line in America. This transportation adds no value to the product,
it does not transform it and the customer would not be happy in paying for it!

If you look at Toyota where the tools and techniques behind Lean
Manufacturing have been refined as part of the Toyota Production System
(TPS) you will see that many of their suppliers are located close to their plants.
Products are not shipped huge distances at great cost with the potential for
delay and damage.

Lean Newsletter 2021

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Costs of the waste of Transport
The waste of transport is a disease that causes the company to hemorrhage
money at an alarming rate; you have to pay for material handling equipment,
staff to operate it, training, safety precautions, extra space for the movement
of material and so forth.

Transportation often leads to operations having to wait for product to be

delivered due to delays (the waste of waiting), thus costing you more money as
well as extending your lead times and creating delivery problems.

Excessive transport also gives many opportunities for handling damage and
losses.

Causes of the Waste of Transportation

There are many causes that contribute to the waste of transport, the main one
being the waste of overproduction which in turn leads to the waste of
inventory; inventory that then has to be transported throughout your facility
or between factories and even continents. The causes of this overproduction
Lean Newsletter 2021
can be everything from excessive setup times and the need for economic batch
sizes to the fact that “that is the way we have always done it!”

In addition to overproduction our organizations layouts often lead to the need

to transport product, we are often organized in functional silos, that is we have
discreet areas for specific functions such as welding, pressing, molding etc. This
leads to the need to transport product from each of these areas to the next
and at times back again after each function is completed.

Even within each functional area we tend to leave excessive gaps between
operations requiring the need to use things like pump trucks to move product
about.

Examples of wastes of Transport

 The transport of product from one functional area such as pressing, to
another area such as welding.
 The use of material handling devices to move batches of material from
one machine to another within a work cell.

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  The shipment of product from one “functional” factory to another.
 The transportation of “cheaper” components from one country to
another.

How to eliminate or reduce Transportation

Layout should be changed as per the principles of lean manufacturing, create
value streams and make that value flow at the pull of the customer. This
requires you to have production lines or cells that contain all of the value
adding processes rather than a functional layout. It also means reducing the
spaces between those operations and avoiding the use of “super machines” by
using small dedicated (often cheaper) machines instead. Improving factory
layout through the use of value stream mapping and process mapping can give
huge savings in time and money, often with little cost involved relative to the
savings to be made.

Lean Newsletter
In next letter we will discuss about waste of inventory in detail. 2021

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

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