How does flow minimize waste in production?
Flow minimizes waste in the following ways:
- Waste: Over-production. Flow improved the leadtime and thereby the need for forecasting is removed (maybe still necessary at a higher level). With short leadtime over-production is not necessary – production is “make to order”.
- Waste: Transportation. By creating flow the need for transporting goods to/from shelves/stocks and transporting goods between processes is removed.
- Waste: Waiting. Because processes are stabile (a condition for flow) and in time-balance, neither processes nor persons should wait for other processes.
- Waste: Excess processing. Flow can not remove this waste. It is a management job to identify the customer needs and only meet this demand.
- Waste: Inventory. Flow removes all need for inventory.
- Waste: Rework or correction. Flow will not remove rework or correction, but the stabilization process before flow was created, demands that time spend on rework and correction is minimized.
- Waste: Motion. A lot of unnecessary motion is cause by a lack of flow. With flow parts are automatically moved to the process.
