006: Finding Waste In Your Retail Operation

Your retail operation is wasting time and money. To become more competitive, you must stop this. To deliver the aspirations that your business has, you must stop this. So, in this episode of the Retail Transformation Show, you will learn one of my favourite concepts from Lean Six Sigma: identifying process waste. Once you’ve identified this, you can focus on eliminating it to transform your retail operation.

 

 

Lean principles define 7 different wastes, which can be remembered using the acronym TIM WOOD. Identifying and eliminating these process wastes will improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your store processes and retail operations. Listen to find out more, including retail specific examples of process waste that you can spot. You’ll also learn about 2 other forms of waste that you can find in your retail operation.

What is “waste” in a retail operation?

First up, we’re not talking about literal waste or rubbish. Lean thinking introduces process waste. This is activity which results in wasted time, wasted money, even wasted focus. Really, it’s anything that isn’t adding specific, direct value to customers or the business.

To help identify what customers value, just ask the very simple question: would a customer pay for this? If yes, they keep doing this! But if no,  then you’ve probably just identified some waste in your processes and procedures.

The 7 wastes

Lean thinking originated from Toyota. As part of the whole ‘lean’ concept was the identification of 7 waste types. Between 1948 and 1975, Toyota were focused on improving their car production processes. There was a huge, company wide initiative – a culture shift really – to improve ways of working and focus on customers. They called it the Toyota Production System.

Despite originating in a manufacturing environment, there is a lot that we can learn and apply to retail environments. In particular, identifying and eliminating waste. In Toyota, they called it “muda” – that’s “waste” in Japanese. There were 7 different types to focus on. Now translated to English, the 7 wastes can be easily remembered using the acronyn TIM WOOD or TIMWOOD – one word or two, whatever works for you!

The 7 wastes are:

• Transport – moving stock around takes time and energy.
• Inventory – high stock holding gets in the way when it is not needed right now.
• Motion – people moving around but not actually doing useful, valuable work.
• Waiting – creating delays when other work still needs to be done.
• Over processing – aiming for perfection when good is enough.
• Over production – excessive production of stock and other things.
• Defects – leading to rework and even more TIM WOOD waste.

Plus other types of waste

In the show, we also spoke about other types of waste too. In particular:

• Skills or specialisms – Not using the skills of your workforce is a waste.
• Behavioural waste – company culture can result in more waste.

What should you do next

Now that you understand the concept of waste, next, you need to identify it. Once you’ve spotted it, finally, you can eliminate it. Remember the acronym TIM WOOD when you’re next doing / observing / mapping your operations and processes. You must continually ask the question – would a customer pay for this? Ask it about overall processes and jobs. However, you should also ask that same question about the little details too. In turn, that should help lead you to find the waste in your retail operations.

Download the cheat sheet to find and eliminate waste