Waste Walk (TIMWOOD)

What this tool does

CM8-263 is a structured waste walk register. You walk the floor, log each waste you see against the classic seven categories plus underused talent, put an honest order-of-magnitude cost on it — minutes per occurrence, occurrences per week, an hourly rate — and the tool ranks everything by annual cost. The output is a priority list that tells you which waste to attack next and what it is worth, printed as a report you can pin to the improvement board or take to a management meeting.

Everything runs inside this single file. There is no account, no upload and no network request of any kind, so your process observations and cost rates never leave the computer you are using.

The seven wastes, plus one

The seven wastes — remembered as TIMWOOD — describe every way a process consumes time and money without adding anything the customer pays for. The eighth, underused talent, was added later and belongs on every walk. For each one: what it is, what it looks like, and the question that finds it.

Transport — moving product between locations. Forklifts double-handling pallets, parts trucked between buildings, anything travelling further than it must. Moving a part never makes it more valuable; it only risks damage and burns time. Ask: why does this part travel, and who decided the route?

Inventory — material waiting as stock or work-in-progress. Racks of parts between operations, a month of raw material, finished goods with no order against them. Inventory hides problems: the pile between two machines is the exact size of the scheduling problem nobody has fixed. Ask: how long has this pile been here, and what is it waiting for?

Motion — people reaching, walking, searching. The operator who leaves the machine for a tool, the fitter who queues at a central bin, anyone bending to a pallet on the floor. Motion is waste of the person, where transport is waste of the product. Ask: how many steps does this job take, and which of them touch the product?

Waiting — people or machines idle. A machine waiting for sign-off, a crew waiting for a crane, a shift waiting for material. Waiting is the easiest waste to see and the one people have learned not to mention. Ask: what is this person or machine waiting for right now, and how often does that happen?

Overproduction — making more, or earlier, than the next process needs. Batch sizes set years ago, machines kept running "to stay efficient", stock built for forecasts that never land. Ask: who consumes this, at what rate — and why are we making it at a different one?

Over-processing — effort the customer does not value. Polishing a face the drawing never called for, tolerances tighter than the function needs, triple-checking what one check would catch. This is the waste that surprises people, because it looks like diligence. Ask: where is this requirement written, and would the customer notice if we stopped?

Defects — scrap, rework, corrections. The rework loop at paint, the mis-pick walked back to stores, the credit note. Defects are usually the most expensive waste per event, because they consume everything already invested in the part and then consume it again. Ask: what proportion goes round twice, and what does one lap of the loop cost?

Underused talent — skills and ideas not used. The setter with a notebook of improvements nobody reads, the operator who could self-inspect but is not allowed to. It rarely quantifies neatly — log it anyway, because the people closest to the waste hold most of the countermeasures. Ask: who knows how to fix this, and has anyone asked them?

Walking a waste walk

A waste walk is sixty minutes, one area, done deliberately. Pick a single area or product route, take this register or a notepad, and follow the product, not the people. Start where material enters the area and trace one part's path: every time it stops, is moved, is touched twice or waits, ask which waste this is, and log it with what you actually saw — not what the procedure says happens.

Watch the discipline points. Log the event, not the person: "operator walks to cabinet" is an observation, "operator wastes time" is an accusation, and one accusation ends honest walking for a year. Do not fix anything during the walk — you are hunting, not cooking. And resist the temptation to log only the wastes with obvious solutions: the register exists to rank the problem, not to flatter the fix.

One area per walk, walked well, beats a whole-site tour. Come back to the same area a month later and the walk becomes a measurement.

Quantifying honestly

Each observation carries three numbers: minutes lost per occurrence, occurrences in a typical week, and an hourly rate. The tool does the rest:

The rate comes from the row when you set one — do that where the waste burns a dearer resource, such as a bottleneck machine or a paint booth with materials — and from Settings when the row is blank. Weeks per year defaults to 48 so shutdowns and holidays do not silently inflate the total.

Be honest about what these figures are: paced estimates, good to perhaps a factor of two. That is exactly good enough, because the register's job is ranking, and an order-of-magnitude cost ranks correctly where a gut feeling does not. A waste at ten thousand a year and a waste at eight hundred do not need another decimal place to be told apart. False precision — timing three occurrences to the second and quoting the annual figure to the cent — costs effort and buys credibility problems, because the first person who checks your stopwatch work will treat one wrong digit as licence to dismiss the whole register. Enter both time and occurrences, or neither; the tool refuses half-quantified rows because a number built on one real figure and one blank is worse than no number.

Overproduction — the mother waste

Overproduction is usually listed in the middle of TIMWOOD and belongs at the top, because it manufactures the other wastes. Make fifty when ten are needed and the extra forty must be transported to a shelf, counted, stored as inventory, searched through, and — if a defect is found later — reworked or scrapped forty at a time instead of ten. It is also the hardest waste to see, because it looks like productivity: the machine is running, the numbers are up, everyone is busy. When a walk keeps finding inventory and transport in the same corner, look upstream for the batch size or the schedule that is producing ahead of need — that is usually the root, and the racks are only the symptom.

Count versus cost

The two hbar charts tell deliberately different stories. Motion is nearly always the most frequent observation — every area has walking, reaching and searching — but at a few minutes per event it is rarely the most expensive. Defects are the opposite: rarer, and brutal per event, because each one wastes everything already spent on the part. If you prioritise by count you will spend the year relocating tool cabinets while the rework loop quietly eats the margin. The register therefore ranks by annual cost everywhere, and the dominant-type tile is computed on cost, not count. Use the count only as a walking guide — a high count of small wastes in one area often shares a single root cause worth one project.

The accepted status

Some wastes are not economic to fix now: the lease ends next year, the product is being retired, the fix costs more than a decade of the waste. Mark them accepted, record the reason in the countermeasure box, and let them sit visibly in the closed book with their annual value against them. This is deliberate. An honest backlog — "we know about this, it costs three thousand a year, and we are choosing not to fix it yet, for this reason" — beats a pretend commitment that rots at the bottom of an action list. Accepted is a decision with a review date in spirit, not a shrug; when the lease ends or the volumes change, the row is still there with its number, ready to reopen. Eliminated is stricter: the tool will not accept an eliminated status without the countermeasure recorded, because "it went away" is not a countermeasure and it will come back.

From register to kaizen

The register is the front end of an improvement system, not the whole of one. The effort field splits the countermeasures three ways, and each way has a home. Just do it items — shadow boards, bin moves, a re-issued work instruction — should be done within the week by the area's own people; the just-do-it backlog tile counts the ones going stale. Small projects are kaizen-event material: a focused few days with the operators of the area, using the register rows as the event's charter and the annual cost as its business case. Big projects — layout, capital, systems — go to whatever planning process spends money, taking their quantified rows with them as evidence. When a countermeasure works, verify it on a later walk before marking the row eliminated: the eliminated tile is only worth showing to management if every value behind it survived a second look.

FAQ

Who should walk? Pairs work best: someone who knows the area and someone who does not. The insider knows why things are as they are; the outsider still notices them. Managers walking alone tend to be shown the process, not the waste.

How often? One area per week is a sustainable rhythm for most sites. The same area should be re-walked every one to two months — the second walk measures the first.

What hourly rate should I use? A loaded rate: wage plus employment overheads for labour, or the machine-hour rate where the machine is the scarce resource. Keep one default and override per row only where the resource is genuinely dearer — a walk priced at five different rates invites arguments about rates instead of wastes.

Should I log a waste I cannot quantify? Yes. Underused talent almost never quantifies, and half the value of a walk is the unquantified rows that later turn out to share a root cause. Leave the time and occurrence fields blank rather than inventing numbers.

Is the quantified total a savings target? No. It is the size of the identified leak. Money is saved only when a waste is eliminated, verified, and the freed hours are redeployed to work that matters — and the closed book tracks exactly that.

Saving your work

Observations, settings and the report header are written to this browser's local storage as you type, and the toolbar shows the time of the last save. That storage belongs to one browser on one computer: another browser, a private window, a second machine or a clean-up tool that clears site data will not have it.

Treat Export .json as the real save — one file containing everything, which Import .json restores anywhere. Export CSV gives you the register for spreadsheet work and includes every filtered record, not only those drawn on screen. Reset asks twice, then erases everything this tool has stored. There is no undo.

Accuracy & disclaimer

The arithmetic is deliberately simple — minutes times occurrences times a rate times weeks — and the tool does it faithfully. Everything that matters sits underneath it: whether the minutes were paced honestly, whether the occurrence count reflects a typical week, and whether the rate is a fair loaded figure. The annual costs are prioritisation estimates, not accounting figures, and the quantified total is the size of an identified problem, not a saving. Do not present it as one until wastes are actually eliminated and verified. This is a record-keeping and prioritisation aid, not financial advice and not a substitute for a properly costed business case where real money is to be spent.