The Eight Wastes: A Practical Breakdown

Lean and Continuous Improvement often talk about “waste” — but what does that really mean in practice? At its core, waste is any step in a process that doesn’t add value to the end customer. Whether you’re in aerospace, manufacturing, construction, or even professional services, recognizing these wastes can save time, money, and frustration.

Below, I’ll break down the Eight Wastes, using the popular DOWNTIME acronym, with real-world context, examples, and thoughts from my own experience.

1. Defects

Defects are the most obvious form of waste. We all want to deliver high-quality work (think Six Sigma), but no system is perfect. Every industry has its own tolerance for errors.

Take Boeing’s Starliner program: costly defects not only led to billions in overruns, but also to executives being fired — and astronauts having to rely on their direct competitor, SpaceX, to get home. In aerospace, tolerances have to be astronomically (pun intended) low, requiring advanced simulations and rigorous testing. On the other hand, if a food processing plant has 3 out of every 100 cans of peaches coming off the line with punctures, it’s a problem, but maybe not our first investment priority. Context matters.

2. Overproduction

Overproduction ties up cash in unfinished goods or inventory. It’s essentially money stuck in your value stream. That’s why pull systems and Just-in-Time (JIT) manufacturing have begun to replace traditional push systems.

Unfortunately, JIT’s limits became massively evident during COVID, when entire supply chains collapsed overnight. Add to that wildcards like a shipping terminal shutting down due to a bridge collapse, and it’s clear that predictive analytics and MRP systems are key to striking the right balance between lean and resilient. We need to understand our financial position and tolerance for risk when determining our required levels of safety and buffer stock.

3. Waiting

Some waiting is unavoidable — In construction, you can’t start framing on a freshly poured foundation, or begin painting before the drywall has been mudded, taped and textured. But waiting exposes bottlenecks, and bottlenecks are where you find opportunity.

Waiting is a symptom, so this is where we want to deploy our root cause analysis toolkit.

Choosing the right tool(s) is going to be context dependent. If we've uncovered a simple bottleneck we can start with 5 Why's, if it's a more complex systematic bottleneck, we'd start with VSM and Ishikawa Diagrams, or if we're in a data-heavy environment, we can use statistical tools in R or Python to run regressions, time-series/forecasting (ARIMA, SARIMA or exponential smoothing), ANOVA, or Monte Carlo/Discrete-Event simulations.

Once we've employed our tool(s), we measure cycle and takt times, adjust, and repeat. Continuous Improvement is iterative by design.

4. Neglect of Human Talent

In my opinion, this is the worst waste of all. When staff aren’t trained, empowered, or trusted, the organization not only loses efficiency, it loses future leaders.

Lean and CI initiatives are strongest when leadership sponsors them but frontline employees drive them. That involvement not only sparks buy-in, it surfaces insights only the people closest to the work can see. Culture is everything here.

5. Transportation & Logistics

Transportation shows up in three places:

1. Moving parts, people, or materials between sites

2. Moving items within a facility

3. Delivering finished goods to distributors and customers

   
   

While transportation is a necessity, we have to keep in mind that as companies outsource more of their value and supply chains, they add layers of complexity and risk. Every new partner is a potential bottleneck or cost driver. We can break this down by viewing each supplier as an additional variable that we've introduced into our supply chain's model. Adding one more supplier doesn’t just add one more relationship — it adds multiple new combinations of risk. Supply chain complexity grows combinatorially, not linearly, which means each additional variable multiplies the number of ways things can go wrong. That’s why scaling supply chains requires systems thinking, not just more vendors.

6. Inventory

Inventory exists in three forms:

• Inputs: raw materials, parts, or assemblies

• WIP (Work in Progress): goods currently being worked on

• Outputs: finished products ready to ship

Too much inventory ties up cash, increases storage costs, and risks obsolescence (think fast fashion or perishable goods). Too little inventory, as COVID taught us, leaves you vulnerable to supply chain shocks.

Tools like Kanban, Andon, ERP systems, and predictive analytics can help find the “sweet spot” — but it always comes down to balancing capital, risk tolerance, and customer expectations.

7. Motion

Motion is wasted movement — whether it’s an employee walking too far to grab a tool, or a process that requires excessive handoffs.

Solutions include:

• Horseshoe cells in manufacturing

• Spaghetti diagrams to optimize kitchens

• Smart office layouts (like placing printers strategically)

• Kitting in manufacturing

• Streamlined approval workflows in service firms

Each small improvement compounds into a big efficiency gain.

8. Excess Processing

This is the waste of doing more than the customer values. It might mean extra coats of paint, redundant fasteners, or delivering a product that exceeds the customer's requirements.

It’s a balancing act between quality and cost. Put out a product you’re proud of, but don’t burn time and money on “extras” that no one asked for.

Closing Thoughts

The Eight Wastes aren’t abstract theory — they show up in everyday operations across industries. The trick isn’t just spotting them, but building a culture and system to continuously reduce them.

Lean and Continuous Improvement are less about tools and more about mindset: respect people, reduce waste, and reinvest the value into growth.