Knowledge Base · Foundations
How do I spot waste in an office process?
Pick the one waste you suspect is most common in your work and tally it for three days before trying to fix anything. Chapter 1 of the book sets exactly this exercise: count first, because the waste you can see in numbers is the waste a team can agree to remove.
Start by choosing one of the eight wastes, the one you believe you meet most often. Do not try to fix it yet. For three days, keep a simple tally on paper and make a mark every time it happens. If you chose waiting, mark every approval or answer you are stuck behind. If you chose motion, mark every time you click through screen after screen hunting for one piece of information.
Three days of counting does two things. First, it replaces an impression with evidence: most people are surprised by their own totals. Second, it shows you where the waste concentrates. In the book's manufacturing case study, a team trained on the eight wastes used simple data to find that a large share of their defects came from a single cutting station. Aiming at that one station cut their overall defect rate by nearly 40% in three months.
In the book's sequence, a fix comes only after the tally, and it is a small one. Waste spotting is a seeing skill before it is a solving skill. The tally gives you and your team a shared, factual starting point instead of competing opinions about whose frustration is biggest.
Open the Guided Process Mapper in ClarionEX (free in Lite)
Related questions
- What are the eight wastes?
- What is waste in a process?
- What is a gemba walk (a "go and see"), and how do I do one?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 1 (Understanding Continuous Improvement).