The Waste of Motion; Causes, examples, solutions

The waste of Motion

Motion is one of the eight wastes of lean manufacturing or the 8 mudas.
Motion being a process step that is not value adding, moving is not necessarily
working! As we know that only a process step that transforms the product in
some manner that the customer explicitly wants is a value adding step, moving
product does not transform it any way therefore is a waste.

Motion as a waste has a long history, being highlighted by Frank Gilbreth

within his “motion studies” at the start of the twentieth century; he observed
bricklayers bending to lift heavy bricks from floor level and showed that
delivering the bricks to the workers at the level they were required made a
huge increase in the working efficiency as well as reducing strain induced
injuries.

Whilst we may not be able to eliminate all motion within a work cell we can
work to minimize it and make each movement as stress free as possible.
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Causes of the Waste of Motion
The main causes of the waste of motion are with regards to cell layout, placing
product at floor level on pallets, poorly arranged space, tools that are
disorganized, lack of space and organization for component parts and so on.

Another problem can be the design of your working method, does it cause you
to constantly turn and rearrange the product being worked on? Design of the
product itself can impact in the same manner.

Examples of wastes of motion

 A machine that travels excessive distance from start point to where it
begins work.
 Heavy objects placed on low or high shelves.
 Searching for tools and equipment.
 Walking across work space to retrieve components or use machines.
 Constantly turning and moving product during assembly.
 Having to reorient component when taken from its location.
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 Reaching excessive distances when taking components and tools.2021
How to eliminate or reduce the waste of Motion
Whilst there will always be some form of motion within our process it should
be minimized as much as possible, both to reduce overburden (Muri) and to
improve our efficiencies; this is a benefit to us and our employees as we are
making their work easier.

The simplest and most powerful lean manufacturing tool at our disposal to
eliminate the waste of motion within our work cells is that of 5S. This will on
the whole cost us nothing other than the time of our team but will result in
efficiency gains in the order of 10% to 30% in most cases as well as making our
work area safer preventing accidents.

5S also starts the ball rolling with regard to standardized operations; it should
lead you to develop standard operating procedures (SOP) for your processes
defining the best way to conduct a specific operation.

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The lean tool of single minute exchange of Die (SMED) will also remove many
wasteful motions from our setup process, using similar principles to 5S; they
are applied to the setup process of our work and will often reduce setups from
hours to single minutes.

Motion is a significant factor within the eight wastes and every effort should be
made to remove it from our processes to both increase efficiencies as well as
make work easier for all those involved. Movement is not work, but it costs us
time and money; so look to lean tools such as 5S to help us reduce and
eliminate excessive motion from our processes.

In next letter we will discuss about waste of Extra Processing (Over Processing)
in detail.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Lean Newsletter 2021

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