Wastes in an Organisation: Transportation

I wrote about the eight most common wastes in an organisation and explained DEFECTS, OVERPRODUCTION, WAITING and NON-UTILISED TALENT wastes in my previous blog posts. Link to my previous blog posts is here. This blog post is about the fifth waste of DOWNTIME: Transportation. Definition By dictionary definition transportation is the movement of people or goods from one place to another. Transportation waste is caused by moving materials, products, equipment or information around unnecessarily. Transportation costs money, takes time and increases the likelihood of damage on transported items. Therefore although it cannot be eliminated, it should be minimised. In a business office transportation refers to the movement of information or services between people or departments. Movement of files and documents from one location to another and email attachments are some examples. The more people there are who handle the information for review, approval or reporting, the more time the process takes and therefore the chance of errors increases. In a manufacturing plant, on the other hand, transportation refers to the movement of materials, products or equipment between stations, from and to the warehouse as well as information transfer between people. Transportation of materials, products or equipment can result in physical damage to them.

Whether or not it results in defects or delays, transportation is a potential waste of money.

Possible Causes of Transportation Waste

• Poor plant layout that requires extra forklift or human movement

• Poor office layout

• Poor process planning

- Unnecessary or excessive steps in the process

- Misaligned process flow

• Having multiple storage locations

Possible Impacts of Transportation Waste

• Loss of time

• Inefficient use of staff's time

• Defective products that require rework or scrapping

• Delays

Possible Solutions Transportation waste can not be eliminated but can be minimised. The goal should be less frequent handling of products or materials with the shortest possible distances between process steps. In the case of information transport, effective systems providing effective communication and data sharing solutions should be used.

Following measure can be taken to minimise the transportation waste:

• Simplify processes by use of process maps

"A process map is a planning and management tool that shows flow of work visually and used to improve efficiency in organisations. It shows what and who is involved in a process and help organisations to recognise improvement areas in their processes. A process map helps to identify process boundaries, process ownership, process metrics, bottlenecks, repetitions and delays."

• Reorganise/ Improve physical layouts

• Handle products or materials less often

• Make distances between steps as short as possible

• Address space issues

• Enable better communication, coordination and daily task management

• Use online information sharing systems

In recent years especially in the service sector employees of more and more companies work from anywhere - not from a designated office. Their transportation is in the means of people or information. In order have less people movements they have video meetings. They also combine the meetings as much as possible so that people travel less and once. They use document transfer systems where they can share documents and virtual whiteboards as well as online chat rooms to enable communication as if people are working in the same office.

I have written about reinventing organisations, how the way businesses work change in a previous blog which can be found here.

If you want to continue the discussion email me at zeynep@derinconsulting.com or follow me on LinkedIn.

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Zeynep Yalcin Parks is lead consultant at Derin Consulting. She helps organisations become better at achieving their purpose. She can help you find the wastes within your organisation and the right solutions to eliminate them .

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Get in touch: hello@derinconsulting.com.

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* Cover photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash.