The 7 wastes of workshop lean management (and how to avoid them)

By Josh West
Lean management

Every good workshop should be focused on efficiency: doing high-quality work at a high speed and low cost.

But as well as improving the positives, you should be reducing the negatives. Lean management in a workshop is about cutting out the waste — the losses in time, money, and materials that are damaging your efficiency and hurting your bottom line.

For most workshops, lean management methods can be boiled down to 7 established types of waste (often abbreviated as ‘TIMWOOD’).

Here’s what you need to know — and how each type of waste in lean management can apply to your workshop:

1. Transport

Waste in transport is about the movement of materials — vehicles, equipment, parts, and tools.

Transporting materials doesn’t add value for your workshop or your customers. In most cases, it removes value by:

  • Adding unnecessary time to each job
  • Adding wear and tear to your equipment and vehicles
  • Adding to the fatigue and exhaustion of your teams.

 

For vehicle workshops:

We’ve talked before about the huge benefits that come with optimising your workshop layout. For most shops, that means:

  • Creating a one-way flow through your workshop for your vehicles
  • Clustering related jobs together to share nearby tools and equipment
  • Storing tools in cabinets close to the workstations that need them.

2. Inventory

Waste in inventory is about ordering and holding excess stock. If you’re overstocked on parts and equipment, you’re sinking capital into goods that aren’t being used. It’s a waste of money, and a waste of precious storage space.

For vehicle workshops:

Instead of holding parts and products ‘just in case’, start moving towards ‘just in time’. By keeping track of your stock levels (and the rate of usage), you can predict the demand for parts as you need them, freeing up space in your workshop (and freeing up more of your cash flow).

That means looking at:

  • The most commonly used parts (oil filters, headlamp bulbs)
  • The most urgent replacements (brake pads, brake drums)
  • The largest parts that use the most storage space (tyres and batteries).

 

3. Motion

As well as equipment and parts, there’s a lot of waste in the movement of your teams. Not just in moving from place to place, but the motions they make as they carry out their jobs. Excessive reaching, bending, and stretching can all have an effect on the energy levels of your teams — and minimising movement can make everyone more efficient.

For vehicle workshops:

  • An optimised layout reduces back and forth walking
  • Organised storage areas reduce the time spent searching for tools
  • Manual handling tools reduce physical strain and exhaustion.

 

4. Waiting

Time spent waiting is time wasted, with staff or equipment sitting doing nothing. It’s often down to problems with a process earlier in the workflow, but it could also be as simple as waiting for:

  • Spare parts or materials
  • The right specialist to be on shift
  • Complete information about the vehicle or the job.

For vehicle workshops:

  • Keep your inventory stocked against the predicted flow of work ahead
  • Match your staff schedule (and skills) to the upcoming jobs
  • Document everything — and make the information available to your teams.

 

5 & 6. Overproduction and over-processing

Overproduction (and over-processing) are about doing more than what’s required. That could mean carrying out unnecessary services, fixing problems that aren’t real problems — or simply triple-checking jobs that have already been properly checked.

For vehicle workshops:

While there’s not much ‘overproduction’ in lean management for a vehicle workshop, there are plenty of places where you can ‘over-process’. That means avoiding things like:

  • Inspecting vehicles that were recently inspected
  • Creating excessive paperwork that your customers don’t need
  • Fixing cosmetic issues that aren’t important
  • Excessive checks on jobs that were checked by a competent person.

 

7. Defects (or errors)

Whenever a service falls short of the proper standards, it creates waste. Both the material waste of parts and products — and the time wasted by redoing the original job.

While defects and mistakes are often a skill issue (and aren’t easy to immediately fix or prevent), there are still steps you can take to reduce their frequency.

For vehicle workshops:

 

Ready to cut waste?

Efficiency is a priority for any good workshop. And while an organised workshop can help you minimise waste and make the most of what you have, the right equipment can take you one step further.

We’ve got a huge range of workshop equipment designed to cut waste and improve efficiency — from our automatic tyre changers and laser-aligning headlamp testers to the diagnostic equipment that guides your teams to the right problems and solutions.

You can see your full range of modern kit in our online shop — or start a chat with an equipment expert to find exactly what you’re looking for.