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Muda, Mura and Muri: Lean Manufacturing

The document discusses the three types of waste - Muda, Mura, and Muri - that are part of the Toyota Production System. Muda refers to non-value adding activities or waste. Mura means unevenness or lack of stability and flow. Muri means overburdening workers or processes. All three types of waste increase costs and reducing them is key to lean manufacturing principles. While the West focuses mainly on eliminating Muda or the seven wastes, Toyota views all three - Muda, Mura, and Muri - as important to address for sustainable improvement.

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342 views7 pages

Muda, Mura and Muri: Lean Manufacturing

The document discusses the three types of waste - Muda, Mura, and Muri - that are part of the Toyota Production System. Muda refers to non-value adding activities or waste. Mura means unevenness or lack of stability and flow. Muri means overburdening workers or processes. All three types of waste increase costs and reducing them is key to lean manufacturing principles. While the West focuses mainly on eliminating Muda or the seven wastes, Toyota views all three - Muda, Mura, and Muri - as important to address for sustainable improvement.

Uploaded by

Sam
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Muda, Mura and Muri

When most people think of lean manufacturing, they think


only of waste reduction through the elimination of the seven
wastes or the seven Muda, Muda being the Japanese term
used by Toyota to signify a non-value adding process or
waste. Muda is only part of the story, but it is the one that
most people focus on because it is the easiest to recognize
and tackle.
Toyota use three Japanese “Mu” words as part of the Toyota
Production System (TPS): Muda, Mura, and Muri. Each of
these is a type of waste and instantly recognized by the
Japanese as part of a business improvement initiative!
Eliminating waste is the way to reduce your costs and hence
improve profit; this is one of the aims of lean manufacturing.
The benefits of lean manufacturing can be very significant if
implemented correctly and sustainably.

Muda, we waste 95% of our time


7 Muda | Source

The Three Categories of Waste


Muda or the 7 wastes as I have already said, are non-value
adding processes or actions. Any process that does that does
not directly modify the product or service in a way that the
customer is willing to pay for should be considered as non-
value adding and thus muda.
Mura is defined as unevenness, a lack of stability and flow.
This unevenness drives the creation of Muda and the 7
wastes (non-value adding activities) and should be tackled
through the application of Just in Time principles.
Muri is overburden: expecting an operator to perform without
a clearly defined process, expecting too much, and not
having the right tools and skills are all examples of
overburden. Again, Muri drives the creation of Muda and
needs to be tackled through initiatives such as 5S, which will
help to introduce standardized work processes.
All of these three categories of waste cost the business
money. The overall aim of any business improvement
technique, be it TPS, Lean manufacturing, Six Sigma or any
other, is to improve the profitability of the business; make
more money!
To do this, however, we have to be able to recognize these
wastes for what they are and be able to tackle the root
causes that cause them to cost our businesses so much!

Muda Reduction
Most definitions of lean manufacturing in the West refer to the
reduction of the 7 wastes as the main aim of lean
manufacturing. However, few definitions of lean differentiate
between the different types of waste and seem to purely
focus on Muda. TPS, however, sees waste as being all three,
Muda, Mura and Muri, something that many lean practitioners
here in the west seem to have forgotten.
Whilst focusing on the 7 Mudas can make some highly
significant savings, we tend to fail to see the big picture and
make inappropriate processes and products more and more
“efficient”, removing time and cost, but not in a sustainable
manner. Because we fail to see the Mura and Muri within our
systems we start to put Muda back into the processes.
We fail to tackle for instance the unevenness (Mura) in our
demand. When sales tries to offer promotions to sell more
products, this creates higher demand in a short space of time,
requiring the process to have to change to meet this demand,
often through increases in inventory, and other wastes that
undo the improvements made in the processes when
focusing purely on eliminating Muda. Mura can be tackled
through implementing the philosophy of Just In Time (JIT).
I have heard arguments that to tackle Muda automatically
causes you to tackle the Mura and Muri in the system. To
some extent this is correct, tackling a problem and using the
five whys to get to root cause should get you to the Mura and
Muri in the system, however without a holistic view of the
whole system they are often overlooked or not even
recognized as the causes by inexperienced practitioners.
Most people will agree that the best way to tackle a problem
is to remove the root cause, therefore in my mind the focus of
any waste reduction program should be on removing both
Mura and Muri, this will automatically remove much of the
Muda (seven wastes) in the workplace.

Muda in Manufacturing
Muda Definition
TPS splits Muda into seven wastes, although over the years
many have been added. But basically any action that does
not physically change the shape of the product or service and
can be done at a more economical rate or with less resource
should be considered as being one of the seven wastes!
Studies done many times over show that in most industries
less than 5% of actions are value adding, 95% of what we do
is not adding value to the product and is a cost to the
business.

Muda: Seven Wastes

7 Wastes | Source

Wormpit and Timwood Muda


The seven wastes or Muda can be remembered through the
use of either of two mnemonics: "TIMWOOD" or "WORMPIT."
Transport
Inventory
Motion
Waiting
Overproduction
Over Processing
Defects
Or
Waiting
Overproduction
Rejects
Motion
Processing
Inventory
Transport

Identify the 7 Wastes Muda


A short definition of each of the seven follows below. For an
in-depth explanation of each waste read my seven
wastes article.
1. Transport. The movement of product and components
between locations, this costs you money but adds no
value to the product. Having different processes located
together can help eliminate transport costs and eliminate
potentially hazardous and dangerous movement of stock
using forklifts and other vehicles.
2. Inventory. Inventory is a buffer used to hide all of the
problems in your system, it insulates you from supplier
failure, poor scheduling, breakdowns, poor quality and
many other problems. In addition inventory requires
space, transporting and ties up your cash. How much
cash could you free in your business if you released just
half of your inventory?
3. Motion. Any movement within the workspace that
cannot be done more ergonomically or efficiently, such as
picking heavy objects up from floor level to a bench or
other working area. This is different from transport as it is
the movement of the person (or machine) within the actual
process.
4. Waiting. Exactly that, waiting for machines, people,
information, product and so on. You would be surprised
how much time people will spend just waiting; consider
more than just production processes. How much time
does your production spend waiting for an order to be
processed before they start working on it?
5. Overproduction. Creating more that the customer
needs or sooner that the customer needs it thus leading to
inventory. We often create more than we need to buffer
potential problems later or to make use of economical
batch sizes within our process.
6. Over-processing. Doing more to the product than is
required by the customer such as over specifying
tolerances causing slower more expensive processes to
be utilized.
7. Defects or Rejects. Probably the first thing that comes
to mind when someone says waste in an industrial setting,
the costs of defects is usually a factor of ten greater than
just the material costs involved.
In addition to the above people often quote the following as
additional wastes;
 Talent. Failure to utilize the people in your organization.
 By-Products. Not using the “waste” from your
processes to good effect such as recovering heat from
machine cooling systems to heat the office.
 Resources. Not efficiently using the resources available
to you, such as turning off machines when not in use,
using more efficient pumps, etc.

7 Muda Slideshow
Click thumbnail to view full-size

Muda Transport | Source

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