Tim Wood: He’s Costing Your Company Money.

• Written By: Six Sigma Training Assistant
• 5-3-2009
• Categorized in: Six Sigma Implementation

The effectiveness of such things as mnemonic acronyms cannot be underestimated in the delivery of Six Sigma training and office philosophy. Some Six Sigma programs take this too far – most of us can probably speak of a time when we have been sat in a meeting or in a training seminar and the amount of jargon and management-speak became simply too much to deal with. It can cause people to become cynical about the whole process as they feel they are being talked down to.

So when you introduce them to Tim Wood, make sure your workers are ready to see the underlying message.

Who is Tim Wood, you ask?

Let me introduce you.

Transportation.  Waste is something that affects a number of businesses. The amount of time wasted taking documents and information, along with other materials, from floor to floor, office to office, really eats into the time that could be spent doing real work.

Inventory Waste is a problem that affects all businesses. At times, some parts of the business may well be redundant.

Not in the frightening, unemployed sense, but in the sense that they are sitting around waiting for more work. If work is scheduled more effectively, people will always be working towards something important and allowing the work to flow.

Motion Waste is a classic kind of waste that can disrupt the effectiveness of a business. Leaving one’s desk unnecessarily – to ask a question that could either wait or be asked via e-mail, for example – cuts into the effectiveness of working time.

Movement from your desk is not motion waste – it is common sense. Movement from your desk to ask how to spell something is motion waste.

Waiting Waste is something that comes to us all. Wasting time is something which will cause problems in any business. It can stop a project being completed on time, and it can block the commencement or the advance of other work. If things are scheduled and streamlined, it need not happen.

Over production is something that a lot of people view as helping effectiveness rather than hindering it. If you have a surplus, goes the theory, then that means less work later on. But by overproducing you will be making extra work for someone else, so efficiency is harmed.

Over processing is another example of seeming efficiency actually hiding something that hinders the efficiency of a working process. By combining documents and putting them into a larger folder, then taking time out to transfer that folder, a worker uses more time than if the person for whom the documents are intended was a few feet away – where if that were the case, the documents could just be passed as they were processed. 

Defect waste is simply the weight of errors that necessitate correction, increasing cost and time wasting. If the same mistake is being made again and again, stopping that mistake at source will mean less time needs to be devoted to correcting it.

Less time, less expense, greater efficiency.

So, say hello to Six Sigma's Tim Wood.

And now say goodbye.