The eight wastes of lean in an office, and how to cut them

Key takeaways

The 8 wastes of lean in an office are defects, overproduction, waiting, unused talent, transport, inventory, motion and extra processing. They come from manufacturing, but every one has an office equivalent, from retyped data to reports nobody reads. In admin work, waiting, defects and unused talent usually cost the most.

• 8 wastes spell DOWNTIME, from defects to extra processing.
• Waiting, defects and unused talent cost offices the most.
• Remove waste before automating or outsourcing a process.
• Walk one process end to end and tag each step.

What are the eight wastes of lean?

The eight wastes are categories of activity that use time or money without adding anything a customer would pay for. Seven were identified by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota. An eighth, unused talent, was added later. They are often remembered by the word DOWNTIME: defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilised talent, transport, inventory, motion and extra processing.

• How BPO can help businesses reduce operational costs
• How to improve operational efficiency in a small business

What does each waste look like in an office?

In an office, the wastes are less visible than on a factory floor because nothing piles up where you can see it. They show as delay, correction and duplicated effort. Each has a recognisable form in admin and customer service work.

• Defects: wrong invoices, mistyped records, replies that miss the question.
• Overproduction: reports, copies and updates nobody asked for.
• Waiting: for approval, information or another person's part.
• Unused talent: senior people doing routine admin.
• Transport: files and requests passed between people and systems.
• Inventory: backlogs of unanswered emails and unprocessed orders.
• Motion: searching folders, switching screens, hunting for a password.
• Extra processing: checks, formats and sign-offs beyond what is needed.

• Process handoffs: why every extra handover adds cost
• Double data entry: what rekeying costs and how to stop it
• Time spent on manual reporting: what it costs

Which wastes cost a small business most?

Waiting, defects and unused talent usually cost a small business most. Waiting stretches a ten-minute task across three days. Defects mean doing work twice and apologising for it. Unused talent is the most expensive of all, because it prices routine work at a senior person's rate.

Take an illustrative director costing £60 an hour who spends six hours a week on scheduling and invoicing. That is £18,720 a year for work a managed team could do at an indicative £12 an hour, or about £3,740. The waste is not the task. It is who is doing it.

• Non-billable hours: how many is too many?
• The cost lever scorecard: find savings process by process

How do you find the wastes in a process?

Find them by following one item through the process from start to finish and noting what happens to it at every step, including the time it spends doing nothing. Mark each step as value, necessary but not value, or waste. The proportion that is pure value is usually small.

• 1. Choose one process and one real item.
• 2. List every step, including waits.
• 3. Record working time and elapsed time for each.
• 4. Tag each step with a waste type or as value.
• 5. Remove or shorten the largest waste first.

• Value stream mapping for service and admin processes
• Process cycle time: how to measure and shorten it

Which wastes can BPO remove, and which can it not?

BPO directly removes unused talent, by moving routine work to people whose job it is, and it reduces inventory by adding capacity where backlogs build. It reduces defects when the provider runs quality checks. It does not remove overproduction, extra processing or waiting for your approvals. Those are design choices, and only you can change them.

• Process standardisation: one best way, lower cost per task
• When not to outsource

Where does lean thinking go wrong in offices?

Lean goes wrong when it becomes a hunt for busy-looking inefficiency instead of a way to serve customers better. Removing every buffer makes a team fragile. Treating conversation as waste damages the working relationships that fix problems quickly. The aim is less wasted effort, not less thinking time.

• Cost-cutting mistakes that end up costing a business more
• Cost cutting and staff morale: how to keep your team on side

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see when a team maps its own work: a weekly report takes half a day to prepare and is sent to six people. Asked directly, two of them read it and one uses a single figure. Replacing it with that figure, sent automatically, returns the half day and removes nothing anyone needed.

• See client work
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Eight wastes checklist

Ask one question per waste for the process you are reviewing.

• Defects: how often is this corrected?
• Overproduction: who uses each output?
• Waiting: where does work sit idle?
• Talent: is the right level of person doing it?
• Transport: how many times does it change hands?
• Inventory: how large is the backlog?
• Motion: how much time goes on searching?
• Extra processing: which checks could go?

• Operational cost reduction checklist: 20 checks
• Cost drivers: what really moves your operating costs

Next step

Choose one process that feels slower than it should. Tell us roughly how it runs and we will walk it with you, tag the wastes and suggest what to remove first.