Manufacturing Process Improvement: Eliminating waste in over-processing

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Manufacturing Process Improvement: Eliminating waste in over-processing

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If you spend time or effort doing more to a product than the customer needs, you are guilty of the waste of over-processing.

With Lean manufacturing, you want to meet all customer requirements. However, you are also trying to balance an efficient flow of production. Spending time on “gold-plating” your product provides no benefit to the customer. It also takes time or money that you could have used better elsewhere.

What are some examples of waste in over-processing?

If you spend money buying equipment capable of accuracy to the hundredth of an inch, yet only produce items that need to meet a tolerance in the tenths of an inch, then you’ve wasted money on the more accurate equipment. If provides no benefit to your customer, yet probably cost you more than an equivalent machine that would have produced acceptable results.

Over-processing isn’t limited to companies that create physical products.

Software is one area where over-production is very common. Programmers often like to think of every possible thing that can go wrong, or develop a program that can handle 100 times more input than is actually required. Besides this taking extra time to develop, it is often the most likely part of a program to have problems – due to limited testing.

Over-processing can even be something that has a negative impact to your customer (besides the additional expenses and delays in time). For instance, if you decide to paint a part, to provide for protection from the elements, your customer may need to take their time and money removing the paint before they use it in their products.

How can you eliminate waste from over-processing?

Before building anything, you should know what the requirements are for the completed product. That’s the only way you’ll know if you have delivered something acceptable.

You also need to know what tolerances are acceptable for you to pass quality assurance or testing.

To see if you have any waste from over-processing, follow it through the manufacturing steps. Bring a copy of the specifications with you. With every task that your workers perform, see if it is needed to meet the specifications. If it isn’t, change your procedures.

Some common areas where you find over-processing are in cutting (more accurate tolerances than are required), heat-treating (which may not be needed), and painting or coating (which may also not be needed).

If you have any steps that you believe really don’t add any useful value to your product, check with the customer to see if this is a requirement that they really want. This is especially true if you are building parts for other groups within your company. One department may not know the needs of another, and may just make assumptions based on their other experiences.

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Tags: • something • expenses • paint • cutting • tolerances • eliminate waste • physical products • accurate equipment • over processing • manufacturing • heat treating • quality assurance • negative impact • over production • process improvement • lean manufacturing • customer requirements • manufacturing process • time and money •

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