How much waste is in your rubbish bins?
What materials is your business throwing out as waste that can be avoided?
Have you ever worked out what is the real value of the products thrown out in the rubbish?
When a manufacturer pays for someone to collect your rubbish, it is not just the collection costs you are paying for. So what is it really costing your business to throw out your material waste?
The real cost of waste product includes process and handling costs during:
- freight
- handling
- transportation
- manufacturing time
- labour time
- warehousing
- utility costs of –
- water
- gas, and
- electricity.
Measuring your product waste gives you an insight into how well your business is performing. The more product waste, the less productive and the less profitable is your business.
Product is thrown in the bin as waste for many reasons. We cut too long or too short, we made the wrong size or colour, damage product, made an error or created an imperfection. No matter what the reason may be, if there is an absence of quality standardised process, then variation, errors and eventually waste and rework will be required to make the product to the specification of the customer.
If staff are performing tasks in different ways, then there is a problem already. If the end-to-end process has not been process mapped and improved there is another problem.
Understanding how much product is wasted and thrown out is key to becoming more business competitive. Reducing or eliminating wasted product will drive down production lead time, reduce labour costs, and reduce costs of production including water, electricity and gas.
How much does your waste cost the business each year through poor process? Measuring your waste baseline and calculating the real cost to business of inefficient use of materials is the starting point to reducing costs of production. The next step is to map and document your key business processes so you can identify main contributing causes of errors, defects, double handling and re-work. Once you understand where your process creates material waste that eventually end up in the bin, you can then use methods such as Lean Manufacturing and error proofing techniques to minimise or eliminate the waste and non-productive activity.
Process mapping is a practical technique to design more productive and efficient systems and processes.
Once improved processes have been designed, the next step is to create standard operating procedures everyone can use to maintain quality and sustain the savings in material efficiency and quality improvement. Every 1% of waste reduction generates significant savings in labour, electricity, water and gas charges. Join the war on waste and cut the cost to business by improving material efficiency rates through more productive, standardised processes and procedures.
For a free Business Review and estimation of savings that your business could generate through more efficient use of materials, please contact Stephen Grech, Director, Doing Business Better at sgrech@doingbusinessbetter.com.au or T 0448 403 094.
