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MUDA is a Japanese word that means waste, and in Italian, it sounds like a cry of alarm!
This is how entrepreneurs, managers, heads of organizations, and business people in general should perceive it.
Any human activity that consumes resources and does not create value is waste, it is muda:
- errors and defects that lead to rework, production of something that is not needed (inventories grow!);
- unnecessary procedures;
- movement of personnel and goods from one place to another without actual utility;
- idle and waiting groups of workers because there are delays or errors in an upstream activity, etc.
As can be seen, waste is much more than an inconvenience; business leaders should fear it like the devil fears holy water... and unfortunately, this is not the case because the examples of waste we cited above are not only common in organizations and tolerated as normal, but often they are not even seen! And for this reason, the first thing lean theory teaches is to learn to see, to learn to see waste in order to eliminate it and produce more with less resource consumption (less human effort, less equipment, etc. ...). The starting point is therefore the hunt for waste, and lean thinking begins to emerge as a remedy against waste by identifying what is valuable, what is useful, what should be produced, aligning value-creating activities in the correct sequence, implementing them without interruption when the customer requests them, and learning to perform them ever more effectively. In these concepts, all 5 lean principles are already present: the identification of what is valuable (“value”), aligning value-creating activities in the correct sequence – identification of the value stream, implementing them without interruption (flow), making the flow run when the customer requests it “pulled flow” (pull), learning to perform them ever more effectively – continuous improvement (“perfection”).
