Where does the company suffer the most significant losses?

In Japanese, there are 3 right words to describe harmful practices in factories. It is Muda, Mura and Muri. Muda means wasteful, Mura means irregular, and Muri means overburdened. These are the causes of poor work performance, and it is vital to know how to combat them. However, wastage seems to be the biggest problem.

What are losses in a company?

An activity that takes energy away from the employees and is funded by the company, and does not have a positive effect is loss-making. If in any way, a company’s activities devour its resources without giving anything in return, there is also talk of losses. Around seven areas can be identified where loss generation is most common. These are transport, procurement, workstation ergonomics, working time, overproduction, non-optimised production process and defects.

In each area, measures can be taken to minimise these losses. However, it is first and foremost essential to realise that they exist in our company at all.

Where are losses in companies greatest?

You can certainly start with the most popular area where unnecessary expenditure is generated. It is all about transport. In many companies, there is an unorganised, unplanned and often unnecessary movement of goods that creates clutter and the need to organise it. That is, it is another transport without which there is no possibility of achieving order.

The second area of significant loss is the miscalculation of company stock needed. After all, if we keep expired products in stock, they will have to be discarded.

The third area mentioned is the tendency to waste time. Poor workstation ergonomics means that the work process itself often contains, quite unnecessarily, duplicated elements of the work being performed. Therefore, proper instruction and the correct arrangement of equipment and furniture are fundamental.

Another crucial area is working time. Missing productive work while waiting for an important order or freezing the process by waiting for an order are just examples. The lousy organisation of work also comes into play here.

The fifth area is overproduction. Again, a lack of awareness of the company’s needs generates a lack of a good plan, which results in too much production in relation to its demand.

The sixth area is the lack of optimisation in the work process. Sometimes there are too many unnecessary activities in the process of making a product. Therefore, it is essential to consider whether each report is necessary.

The seventh area is manufacturing defects. Mitigating losses in this area is challenging, as the flaws are mainly due to errors that will not go away. However, it is worth working on.

We will never eliminate losses at work. However, we can significantly reduce them, contributing to increased profits. Through work optimisation, we can substantially improve the quality of work at individual stations and during many processes, making Muda disappear from our company. At least to a significant extent.