Recently during my internal conversations with so many people, I found that people struggle to remember eight wastes of Lean Six Sigma.
I thought of writing an article with a simple example to remember easily and identify the wastes quickly to eliminate waste to improve the process.
Before going ahead with eight wastes, I would like to stress upon Lean Six Sigma basic concept.
According to Lean Six Sigma, whatever is not adding value to the process is waste.
To remember this waste, I would like to give a simple acronym that will help us remember it forever.
That’s is DOWNTIME
D- Defects
O- Over Production
W- Waiting
N- Not utilizing the talent/underutilizing the resources
T- Transportation
I- Inventory excess
M- Motion
E- Excess processing
Defects: In an IT environment example of this waste is defect code or buggy code
Over Production: In IT environment I traditional software development writing the code with more functionalities that a single user does not even use
Waiting: In an IT environment, the poor technical design will lead to performance and availability issues
Not utilizing the talent/Under utilizing the resources:
In an IT environment, sometimes, we will use an exceptional technical person for basic IT tasks. This approach is not correct, and we need to use the right people at the right level to make things faster and helps people to get motivation and add value to their field.
Sometimes we will not use the resources to give limited training to upskill our technical team to perform exceptional tasks.
Transportation: In an IT environment, sometimes poor integration design tools and not using proper integration tools to fetch the data to and from the application Example: middleware software
Inventory Excess: In the IT environment, sometimes we will buy excess unused hardware and software licenses, and we will not use them at all, and we will develop multiple applications for the same function rather than increasing the existing usability application.
Motion: In the IT environment, one table scans the entire database instead of a specific table.
We can change the logic to save this excess motion to improve the application response time.
Excess Processing: In an IT environment moving data from one system to another system.
To avoid this, we can use centralized storage and organize in a better way to reduce this waste to improve the quality dramatically.
I tried my best to correlate all the wastes in IT Environment with my experience hope you all like it and give your feedback.