subject: How A Small Business Can Avoid Waste [print this page] Considering administration of a small trade, effectiveness is something you cannot stress enough. You must be proficient if you would like to continue in commerce and ultimately develop the little business into a middle sized business. Waste is the adversary to every small business and actually all business. It's simply that small dealing will not take in the losses that unending squander affects.
When you are producing waste, you are losing money. While not all waste can be avoided and cut out, most processes do have room for improvement. If you are not always looking for ways to improve and are satisfied with the status quo, then you will eventually be left behind. Waste comes in different forms, but some forms of waste are worse than others. Complacency and laziness will often let waste stick around much longer than it should.
The main types of waste that you always want to avoid are simple. Doing something more than once is a huge waste of time. This can mean handling paperwork multiple times or walking back and forth between two departments multiple times when a phone call or e-mail would suffice. It can also be much worse than these, when bad product is being made.
How many bad parts should come off a line or out of an automated process before it is identified and stopped? The answer is one. One piece is all it should take to identify that there is a problem and then it should be fixed. Any more than that and the waste is just compounding upon itself. If that bad part gets past the quality checks and actually makes it onto the factory floor, then there should be a way to stop it from actually being used in whatever is being made. That means that the employees should be able to spot the errors and have the authority to point it out and stop the process until it is fixed.
It sounds easy enough, but in practice it can be very complicated and the processes can become overwhelming. You want to keep it as simple as possible and to make it as straightforward as possible. You also want a system in place that is universal for all departments and all processes. There needs to be uniformity in identifying the problems, but also in carrying out the processes. How does one department do something and another department do the same thing, but in an entirely different way? It doesn't make sense to do that.
