WASTE ELIMINATION

Waste Elimination



Taiichi Ohno of the Toyota Company, when asked about the efficiency of his company and large profit sums explained about efficiency and waste or muda management. He initially set out to rival Ford but failed to do with because he could not compete with the modern automated system in 1950 which Ford possessed. So he introduced an alternative and traditional approach. He said minimizing small problems like wasting of motion or even excess inventory leads to quite a difference in the profits and efficiency performance of the company so one should aim to eliminate all forms of waste from their system. Toyota Production System, Taiichi's system talks about Muri (unreasonableness), Mura (unevenness) and Muda (waste). These three should be eliminated. He further classified and segmented muda/waste into 7 categories:

Overproduction

Waste time spent at the machine

Transporting parts and products

Waste in processing

Excess inventory

Waste of motion

Defects

Waste of raw materials and energy

Damage to the environment

A successful company has to make sure to manage all these categories properly and address their concerns in a serious manner. In a cursory glance, they might not seem very important, but the little amounts of loss in some and the major financial losses of others accumulate, and end up affecting the company's overall performance, dramatically.

Out of the nine categories he mentioned. This paper shall attempt to explain how a Europe based Engineering Company namely Volkswagen is also covering these waste management liabilities in order to improve their company and profits.

Waste in Process

Un-necessarily lengthy processes, regardless of whether they are present in assembly lines of the company, or for a dialogue between the customer and the company are harmful. Clients calling the customer service departments for each and every query become tedious and limited. Suppose they wish to ask about the availability of a specific car model with a specific color. It will take a bit of time for the customer to call up the agent, the agent to confirm the customers query and give him the answer. Also there is also less chance of exposing the customers to the new and upcoming attractions the company has to offer. Here is where the websites came along. After creating a traditional web page for their consumers, Volkswagen opted to create a new website and a browsing engine for the ease of their clients and customers, where they could browse about their favorite cars, ask any questions they had. Ultimately this also gave VW the side advantage of imparting information that was an irrelevant to their initial queries but important to them faster and quicker. If the customer was informed efficiently and in a timely manner that will ultimately increase their decision making process, hence increase the rate of conversion or even impacting on the amount of sales being made. Along with this they also needed the power to promote and repurpose the content in various multiple contents as well as the ability of the system to find things that were related and suggest them, even though they were ...