Understanding the waste net: A method for waste elimination prioritization in product development

Abstract

This paper describes a method for prioritization of waste reduction efforts during a Product Development System (PDS) improvement project. Waste refers to activities that absorb resources and increase cost without adding value. Although waste identification and elimination along the value chain has proven useful to PDS improvement, previous work focuses on the waste identification, rather than on its prioritization. This work aims to fill this gap by proposing a "waste coupling" based method to define this sequencing. The method uses a waste set composed of 10 waste types specified into 28 subtypes. The approach is illustrated by an example of possible causal dependencies among subtypes in which both direct and indirect (reinforcement) waste relations are included. This paper's main contributions are: (1) defining a PD specific waste set covering all the PDS elements; (2) describing a procedure to calculate the impact of coupling between wastes through indirect relations; and (3) presenting a heuristic to prioritize from highly coupled waste subsets. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.