Finding The Sources Of Waste

What are you doing to manage your manufacturing waste? There are many different sources of waste at a manufacturing plant that need to be properly controlled or it will lead to excess overhead costs and other things. You must be able to control these costs so they do not spiral out of control and to reduce wastes so you aren't throwing away money. Understanding the wastes will also give you some great benefits in being able to change the product design so that you can exceed your customer's expectations. Waste is one of the biggest annoyances to many manufacturing plants. How can you find a way to reduce waste and to focus on achieving goals that keep costs lower and allow you to meet a certain productivity level?

Out of all the manufacturing programs that are used for improvement, lean manufacturing tends to stand out the most. Lean manufacturing is a great program that will enable you to identify the wastes that are within your plant and will allow you to eliminate them. There are many different sources of waste that you need to be aware of, here are a few that you can get started with:
- Using too many raw materials to crate products. Do your employees constantly toss out materials that have barley been used instead of recycling them?
- Mistakes that happen too often and are not changed or fixed before additional materials are sent through the line.
- Large inventory overhead costs. If you manufacture a lot of products and they end up sitting on the shelves, they will lose their product value. They also end up costing you a lot of money as you need to pay for the warehousing costs.
- Having too many employees working at one time or too many people doing one job.
- Running too many products or machines at the same time.
- Improper organization to the point where employees have to waste a lot of time to get the supplies and things that they need to perform their job duties.
- Improper development of your products, which can lead to mistakes in the manufacturing process.

When you are able to implement lean manufacturing you will be able to understand how to identify the wastes and to seek out a way in which you can reduce the wastes and expensive costs. With lean manufacturing you will identify about 8 different types of waste that are found within the company. It's the things like movement that can be controlled easily through using the right type of organizational techniques from proper layouts to using signals and board to hold tools and other things. It is also important that you evaluate the workloads of your employees and equipment. You need to identify where you can make the right type of changes to your employees workloads so they are not overwhelmed or so that they are not just standing around and waiting on machinery and other people so they can do their jobs.

One of the best ways in which you can cut down on your manufacturing waste is by taking the time to look at your production levels. You need to focus on Just in time manufacturing so you aren't producing a lot of products and keeping them in a warehouse where they lose value and you have to pay more money just to store them. Producing a product at the time when it is ordered allows you to exceed customer expectations. Look for different ways in which you can always focus on value-adding procedures and other things for the company so it makes the company successful.