In order to help identify waste, we can use the acronym DOWNTIME to help us remember the different types of waste.

DOWNTIME is

- Defects
  - Defects are mistakes that require additional time, resources, and money to fix. A defect might involve a defective machine that has to be reworked in order to make the proper part. A defect may be a product that is missing parts because the quality control instructions are vague. This category is broad but the result is the same: mistakes are wasteful and add no value to the process.
- Overproduction
  - Overproduction is when workers just blindly keep producing, even when those who receive their output either aren't ready for it or don't need it. This is an especially common waste in manufacturing, and eats up worker resources. The solution to overproduction lies in establishing a reasonable workflow. By implementing well-established workflows it can keep work from backing up behind particular bottlenecks.
- Waiting
  - Waiting happens whenever work has to stop for some reason. Maybe the next person in line is overwhelmed, or a machine broke down, or you are waiting for approval or materials, or because you've run out of something. No matter what the cause of a bottleneck, some workers will have to wait for a bottleneck to be cleared. Proper staffing levels is crucial to reduce waiting,as extra staff can help clear bottlenecks.
- Not utilizing talent
  - Under-utilizing peoples’ talents, skills, and knowledge or even worse not utilizing them at all can have a detrimental effect on an organization. A company that recognizes the value of skills and improvement ideas from all levels of the company can see great benefits. A company that empowers employees, stops micromanaging, and increases in training can reduce this waste. As an employee you can help eliminate this waste if you communicate to management if you feel you are being underutilized or not utilized.
- Transportation
  - Transportation waste is caused by moving things around too much. Transportation increases costs, wastes time, waste resources, increases the probability of damage, deterioration, and waste of materials. In general. Limiting transportation waste can be easily addressed by common-sense efforts such as simplifying processes, repairing physical layouts, handling products less often, and making distances between steps as short as possible.
- Inventory Excess
  - This waste occurs when there is supply in excess of real customer demand, which masks real production. Having excessive inventory of products that have not been ordered, does nothing good for the customer or the company. It just wastes all of the resources used to make the excess, and waste space used to store excessive inventory.
- Motion waste
  - Motion waste is any excess movement of technicians in manufacturing.. This generally is means that employees have to move too much to get their job done. An example would be constantly bending to get the next item in the process. This extra motion does not add value to the customer, product, service or process. The solution here is to re-arrange layouts to decrease the distance between items needed, and make it easier to reach things that are often used.
- Excess processing
  - This waste generally occurs due to the creation of multiple versions of the same task, This is prevalent when a process has more tasks than what is required, or long-winded poorly designed processes. All of these unnecessarily increase your costs, time and resources. As an experienced technician you are keenly aware of redundancies, in the process and may provide unique insight to management on how to streamline process to eliminate redundancies.

DOWNTIME typically covers most types of waste that you would expect to find in a manufacturing environment, and a good place to start when trying to identify waste in a company.

Learning Objectives:

- 3.1 - Describe the different types of waste as they relate to the manufacturing process.