Akaki poly Technic Collage

AKAKI POLY TECHNIC COLLAGE

BUSINESS DEPERTEMENT
ACCOUNTING AND FINANCE
Level – III

Learning Guide 17
Unit of Competence: Prevent and Eliminate MUDA
Module Title: Preventing and Eliminating MUDA

This learning guide is developed to provide you the necessary information regarding the following
content coverage and topics:

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1. Prepare for work.

2. Identify MUDA.
3. Eliminate wastes/MUDA
4. Prevent occurrence of wastes/MUDA

This guide will also assist you to attain the learning outcome stated in the cover page.
Specifically, upon completion of this Learning Guide, you will be able to:

• Identify Safety equipment and tools

• Tools and techniques are used to draw and analyze current situation of the
work place.
• Wastes/MUDA are identified and measured based on relevant procedures.
• Necessary attitude and the ten basic principles for improvement are adopted
to eliminate waste/MUDA.
• wastes/MUDA are prevented by using visual and auditory control methods.

Learning Instructions:
1. Read the specific objectives of this Learning Guide.
2. Follow the instructions described below 3 to 17.
3. Read the information written in the information “Sheet.
4. Accomplish the “Self-check test.
5. Do the “LAP test”.

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What is Waste?
The elimination of waste is the primary goal of any lean system. In effect, lean
declares war on waste – any waste. Waste or muda is anything that does not have
value or does not add value.
Waste is something the customer will not pay for. When the great Italian sculptor
Michelangelo was asked what he was sculpting, he responded he was not
sculpting but releasing the figure (value) inside by removing the unnecessary
rocks (wastes). Like Michelangelo, we should eliminate all forms of wastes in
any process or product until only what is valuable remains. The key is to
spot waste and then stop waste.
There are two types of wastes: obvious wastes and hidden wastes. It is important
to uncover and eliminate the latter since they are usually bigger. Wastes take the
shape of an iceberg, the tip consists of the obvious wastes while the seen bulk
under the water contain the hidden wastes. Wastes are not necessarily ugly, and
most are outside the waste can! Waste can be in the form of unnecessary output,
input, or processing. It can be in the form of materials, stocks, equipment,
facilities, manhours, utilities, documents, expenses, motion, and other activities
that do not add value.
The steps to effective waste elimination are:
1. Make waste visible.
2. Be conscious of the waste.
3. Be accountable for the waste.
4. Measure the waste.
5. Eliminate or reduce the waste

In other words, before one can stop waste, he should able to see it, recognize it as
waste, identify who is responsible, and finally appreciate its size and magnitude.
Waste that is not seen cannot be eliminated. When something is denied as waste,
it also cannot be stopped. When one refuses to accept responsibility for the
waste, then he will not eliminate it. Finally, when the waste is not measured,
people may think it is small or trivial and therefore will not be motivated to stop
it. As the saying goes “What is not measured, is not improved”.

Muda, Mura, Muri

Aside from “muda” or wastes, the lean system also attacks and avoids “mura”
or overload or overburden and “muri” or unevenness. Mura refers more
specifically to overloading an equipment, facility, or human resource beyond its
capacity. This

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undue stress may cause downtime, defects, delays, and even disasters. Muri
refers to unevenness in production volume.
The wild fluctuations due to extreme highs (peaks) and lows (valleys) in
production scheduling cause periods of overload and long idle time. One way
to reduce muri is to implement heijunka or production leveling. In a way,
mura and muri also cause wastes but in a particular way. Muda, mura, and
muri cause inefficiencies and high costs in any operation.
What Is Muri?

Muri is a Japanese term meaning “overburden or unreasonable”. It is one of the three types of
waste (Muda, Mura, Muri) and a key concept in the Toyota Production System.

In other words, you create Muri whenever you put your team under stress by demanding
unreasonable or unnecessary work that exceeds their capacity.

Muri can drastically decrease your team’s productivity and efficiency. Putting too much pressure
often translates to extra working hours, which will lead to occupational burnout.

Overburdening can hurt your team’s morale and damage the “health” of the whole work process.

You should try to balance at the optimal capacity – a level at which all parts of the system can
deliver results without the need for extra work.

It is easy to say, but let’s discover what can cause Muri.

What Can Cause Muri?

You can overburden your teams without even realizing it. For example, setting unrealistic
deadlines can force different team members to rush the work. This will often lead to poor quality
and decreased customer satisfaction.

Let’s demonstrate this with an example.

If you tell your designer to make twice more images that she is able to produce for a certain
period of time, she will probably do it, but not all of them will be of the highest quality.

More or less, it is like an assembly line. Imagine you have the workers who check the quality of
products, and the faster you run the assembly line, the higher the chance low-quality products will
go to your customers.

There are many different reasons that can cause Muri.

Over-demanding

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The first and more obvious is over-demanding. In the contemporary business world, it is quite
surprising how higher management pushes more work onto their teams, hoping that more inputs
will result in more outputs.

In fact, this leads to a constantly increasing number of waiting tasks, which often results in chaos
and burnouts.

Lack of training

Companies often neglect the need for good training sessions. This is how, at some point, a team
member can end up working on a task much longer than necessary.

Let’s say that you are trained to work as a copywriter. However, the manager decides to use you
as a designer. You will probably need twice more time to deliver good images than a regular
designer will.

Lack of communication

Good communication is crucial for the success of any team. You need to establish clear
communication channels and practices to avoid overburdening.

Imagine that you have a meeting with 3 of your team members, and you decide to make 10 new
landing pages for your website.

Everybody in the meeting agrees and the team starts to work on the project. However, it was just a
verbal agreement, and the designer was not informed of the project until the last day before the
expected deadline.

Respectively, the designer will be overburdened, and she/he will feel the negative effect of Muri
because of miscommunication.

Lack of proper tools and equipment

When proper tools are missing, Muri is inevitable and obvious. If you give new computers to
some of your developers, for example, but the rest work on 5 years old machines, the second
group will definitely feel overburdened because they will need much more time to complete their
tasks using their old equipment.

There could be many other reasons causing Muri. You need to remember that managing all of
them will prevent the whole work process from collapsing.

Now, let’s see how you can deal with Muri.

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Different Ways to Deal with Muri

Lean offers various tools and practices that may help you remove the negative effect of
overburdening or reduce it to a minimum level.

Map your team’s workflow

First, let start by mapping your team’s workflow. For this purpose, you can use a Kanban b

What is Mura?

Mura is one of the “3M” forms of waste identified by the Toyota Production System: mura, muda,
and muri. In Japanese, “mura” means variability, unevenness, or inconsistency.

Mura will most often manifest with an uneven takt time, meaning that your team alternates
between being drowned with work and waiting around. There are two general categories of mura
in Lean: inconsistency in the way a team works, and inconsistency in customer demand. Both of
them need to be considered when trying to improve the process.

Along with Lean management’s two overarching goals: maximizing value delivered to the
customer, with reducing waste and any non-value-adding activities, process variability needs to be
minimized.

Mura coexists with other waste factors:

Muri: overburdening, excessiveness, e.g. overburdening machine or machine operator’s capacity

to an impossible level.

Muda: uselessness, futility - unnecessary actions, e.g. excessive transport of unfinished product.
It’s divided into 7 types:

Seven kinds of waste (Muda)

The presence of all these waste factors forces companies to compensate, causing even more
waste! It can create a loop where customers, having once experienced a delay, change their order
patterns, in turn skewing a company’s upcoming delivery plans, which can end up with forced
overtime or - worse still - forced downtime.

Why is process unevenness bad?

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All Lean/Six Sigma improvement efforts start with standardization and optimization of the
process, as its variability leads to defects and quality drop - changes that directly affect the value
delivered to the customer.

Reasons for process unevenness are plentiful: team members might have various ways of
working, machines may have different operations and outputs, even the way a team gathers
analytical data and reports on results can differ from person to person! Looking at process
inconsistencies can help you better understand your team’s behavior and ways of working.

By definition, a Six Sigma optimized process is one with variability reduced to the point where
the expected output isn’t achieved only 3.4 times out of 1000000 executions. Being able to deliver
on customer expectations with a success rate this high (quasi “zero-defects”) is the chief selling
point of Six Sigma. The method is sometimes summarized with the following Breakthrough
equation:

Detecting mura

One of the best ways to detect mura is through graphs. You can spot variation through differences
in lead times as executed by various teams and on different days or weeks. For example, you only
need to take one look at the Cumulative Flow Diagram to tell if the process is stable and
consistent - i.e. in control - or not. Any drops and jumps are a direct indication of variability at
play

What are the seven types of wastes or “muda”?

A lean system declares war on wastes or “muda”. These wastes are classified into
7 types:
1. Over-production waste
2. Processing waste
3. Transport waste
4. Waiting-time waste
5. Inventory waste
6. Motion waste
7. Defects

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➢ Over-production waste
✓ Definition
• producing more than what is needed
• producing faster than what is needed
✓ Causes
• volume incentives (sales, pay, purchasing)
• high capacity equipment
• line imbalance; poor scheduling/shifting
• poor production planning
• cost accounting practices that encourage build up of inventory

Effects of Muda of Overproduction

Companies often have overproduction as a result of large-lot manufacturing methods or

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mass production. there are several unfortunate effects of over production:

 Anticipatory buying of parts and materials

 Blocked flow of goods

 Increased inventory

 No flexibility in planning

 Occurance of defects

Over-production waste occurs when more goods are produced than can be sold,
resulting in idle finished goods inventory. Over-produced goods are often hidden
wastes since many think they are assets with value.

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be obsolete or costing the company unnecessary expenses just to keep them until they
can be sold if ever. The just-in-time, pull system, and kanban rules prevent over-
production wastes. Also, lean systems favor smaller equipment over large ones to
avoid overproduction due to high but unnecessary capacity utilization.

Producing more than your customer is requesting or before they request it

➢ Processing waste
✓ Definition
• non-value added man processing
• non-value added machine processing
✓ Causes
• unclear customer specifications
• frequent engineering changes
• excessive quality (refinements)
• inadequate value analysis/value engineering
• unclear work instructions

Processing waste comes from unnecessary processing that does not add value
to the item being produced or worked on. Examples are additional steps that
do not

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enhance quality or steps that simply adds excess quality which customers do not
require. Unnecessary documentation is also a form of processing waste. Identify
value-adding and non-value adding activities in the process using techniques
such as value stream analysis and the waterfall diagram.

Unnecessary manual work that does not contribute value to the product

➢ Transport waste
✓ Definition
• unnecessary material movement
• unnecessary tools or equipment movement
✓ Causes
• poor route planning
• distant suppliers
• complex material flows
• poor layout
• disorganized workplace
• line imbalance

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When anything – people, equipment, supplies, tools, documents, or materials – is

moved or transported unnecessarily from one location to another, transport waste
is generated. Examples are transporting the wrong parts, sending materials to the
wrong location or at the wrong time, transporting defects, and sending documents
that should not be sent at all. One way to cut transport waste is co-location,
wherein customers are served by nearby suppliers, usually less than one-hour
driving distance away. Departments working with each other or serving each other
are also put near each other to cut transport waste. For example, materials and
tools departments may be moved, relocated, or pre-positioned beside or nearer the
user departments or their internal customers.

Unnecessary conveyance ofp roducts, from one location to another, or

handoff from one employee to another

➢ Waiting time waste

✓ Definition
• man idle or waiting time
• machine idle or waiting time
✓ Causes
• unsynchronized processes; line imbalance
• inflexible work force
• over-staffing
• unscheduled machine downtime
• long set-up

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• material shortage or delay

• manpower shortage or delay

When resources like people and equipment are forced to wait unnecessarily
because of delays in the arrival or availability of other resources including
information, there is waiting time waste. Waiting for late attendees in a
meeting, waiting for tools to start work, waiting for a signature for a process to
continue, waiting for a late vehicle to transport workers to a project site are
examples of this waste.

Waiting done by customers or by employees

➢ Inventory Waste
✓ Definition
• excessive process (WIP) inventories
• excessive raw material inventories and supplies
✓ Causes
• over-production
• imbalanced line
• long lead times

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• large minimum order quantities

• high rework rate
• JIT-incapable suppliers
• lack of material requisition and issuance standards

Inventory wastes come from the purchasing, issuance, storage of excess or

excessive supplies, materials, and other resources. This waste can also be caused
by overproduction as excess materials and work-in-process are accumulated.
Inventory waste is often due to lack of planning and failure to match purchases
with the actual consumption or usage rate of a particular resource. Another
example is the storing of slow-moving and obsolete stocks like tools and
materials.
More materials or information than is required
➢ Motion Waste
✓ Definition
• unnecessary movement and motions of worker
✓ Causes
• poor lay-out and housekeeping
• disorganized work place and storage locations
• unclear, non-standardized work instructions
• unclear process and materials flow

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Motion waste happens when unnecessary body movements are made when
performing a task. Examples are searching, reaching, walking, bending, lifting,
and other unnecessary bodily movements. Workers commit this form of waste by
searching for tools or documents when their workplace is cluttered or
disorganized. Motion waste often delays the start of work and disrupts workflow.

Unnecessary physical or mental motion often associated with searching

➢ Defects
✓ Definition
• processing due to the production of defects
• processing due to rework or repair of defects
• materials used due to defect and rework
✓ Causes
• unclear customer specifications

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• incapable processes
• lack of process control
• unskilled personnel
• departmental rather than total quality
• incapable suppliers

Quality is doing the right thing right the first time. It is about prevention and
planning, not correction and inspection. Bad quality or defects do not only result
in customer dissatisfaction and damage to company image, but also in wastes due
to additional costs and time to recall, rework, repair, and replace the defective
items. Continuous quality improvement and preventive measures are the most
effective means to cut defect wastes.

A mistake which reaches the customer

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Group Assignment (25%)

Maximum member 5

1) What are the benefits of identifying and eliminating wastes/Muda to the workers of a company? (4
points)
2) Write the difference between prevent and eliminate waste?
3) 2. Write down the steps to identify wastes/Muda. (4 points)
4) Write at least two cause and effect of each types of the seven wastes?

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