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Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Lean Manufacturing

Waste

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

/weɪst/nounCore term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, waste means: In lean thinking, any activity that uses time or resources but adds no value for the customer, such as waiting, extra movement or making too much.

In Turkish: israf, muda

How it is used

Lean teams identify, eliminate and reduce waste. The classic list has seven wastes: transport, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, overprocessing and defects; many add an eighth, unused skills. The Japanese word muda is also common.

Example sentences

  1. Walking 200 meters to get parts is waste; let's bring the rack to the line.

  2. During the gemba walk we found waste in almost every step of the packing process.

Common collocations

  • eliminate waste
  • seven wastes
  • identify waste
  • reduce waste
  • lean manufacturingA way of running production that aims to deliver what the customer needs with the least waste of time, material and effort, based on the Toyota Production System.
  • value-addedDescribing an activity that changes a product in a way the customer is willing to pay for, such as machining, assembling or painting it.
  • value stream mappingA lean method of drawing all the steps, material flows and information flows needed to make a product, to see where time is lost and plan improvements. Often shortened to VSM.
  • gembaA Japanese word meaning 'the real place': where the actual work is done, such as the shop floor, the warehouse or the lab.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Lean Manufacturing

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