What are the eight wastes?

Defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transport, inventory, motion and extra processing, remembered as DOWNTIME. The eighth, talent, was added to Toyota's original seven.

How long should the walk take?

Forty-five to sixty minutes on one process, then fifteen minutes at the board. Longer walks collect more than the team can act on.

What do we do with the examples?

Pick two or three to fix this month and give them owners. The rest are the start of an improvement backlog; sort them on an impact/effort matrix.

8 wastes walk or gemba walk?

Every 8 wastes walk is a gemba walk; not every gemba walk is about waste. A gemba walk can have any theme: safety, standard work, flow. The 8 wastes walk fixes the theme and the board, so a group new to lean sees the wastes for themselves.

Mixed groups: an operator, a supervisor, someone from the office, someone from another area. Fresh eyes find the wastes the area has stopped seeing.

How often should a line be walked?

Quarterly per line is common, with a different group each time. The backlog from one walk usually takes a quarter to work through.

Lean Studio board · Improvement & ideas

8 Wastes Walk board

In one sentence

An 8 wastes walk is a gemba walk structured around the eight lean wastes, defects, overproduction, waiting, non-utilized talent, transport, inventory, motion and extra processing, with the aim of finding a real example of each in one process.

An 8 wastes walk is a gemba walk with a purpose: find a real example of each of the eight wastes in one process. The board has a panel per waste, and the team fills each with what it saw, where, and roughly how much. It is the fastest way to teach the wastes and to build a list of kaizen targets on the same afternoon.

See it in action Start a 90-day pilot

Defects

Orange peel rework, coating: 9% of parts

Overproduction

Brackets stamped 3 days ahead of weld

Waiting

Assembly waits 20 min for the forklift each morning

Non-utilized talent

Setter's changeover ideas never asked for

Transport

Parts cross the plant twice, 140 m each way

Inventory

5 days of coil at receiving

Motion

Welder walks to the tool room twice a shift

Extra processing

Pick list re-typed into the label system

When to use it

When to use the 8 Wastes Walk board

When training a team on lean: an hour on the floor beats a slide on the wastes.
At the start of a kaizen event, to pick targets from what the team can see.
Every quarter on one line, with a different group each time.
When a process feels slow but nobody can name the waste.

What is on the board

1
Defects
Scrap, rework, returns.
2
Overproduction
Making more, sooner or faster than the next step needs.
3
Waiting
People or machines idle for parts, tools, information, approvals.
4
Non-utilized talent
Skills and ideas not used.
5
Transport
Moving material further than it needs to go.
6
Inventory
More raw material, WIP or finished goods than the process needs.
7
Motion
Walking, reaching, bending, searching.
8
Extra processing
Work the customer does not pay for: double checks, polishing, re-entering data.

Running it

How to run an 8 Wastes Walk session

1
Pick one process, not the whole plant. Brief the group on the eight wastes with one example each, in ten minutes, before you leave the room.
2
Walk in pairs of two or three, each pair carrying the board on a tablet or a card with the eight panels. 45 to 60 minutes.
3
Stand still at each station long enough to see a full cycle, then write what you saw, where, and a rough size: minutes, metres, pieces.
4
One example per sticky, in the panel for the waste it is. If a pair argues about which waste it is, that is a good conversation; pick one and move on.
5
Back at the board, 15 minutes: read every panel, merge duplicates, and dot-vote the examples worth fixing this month.
6
Give the top two or three an owner and a date. Move the rest to an impact/effort matrix as the start of a backlog.
7
Good output: all eight panels filled with things the team saw, not things it knows, a sized backlog, and three actions with names.

Worked example · sample data

Worked example

The sample walk filled all eight panels on one afternoon. Defects: orange-peel rework in coating on 9% of parts. Overproduction: brackets stamped three days ahead of what weld needs. Waiting: assembly stands 20 minutes each morning for the forklift. Non-utilized talent: the setter has changeover ideas nobody has asked for. Transport: parts cross the plant twice, 140 metres each way. Inventory: five days of coil at receiving. Motion: the welder walks to the tool room twice a shift. Extra processing: the pick list is re-typed into the label system. The dot vote put the morning forklift wait and the re-typed pick list on top, both cheap to fix. The team also went to talk to the setter that week, since his panel had cost nothing and pointed at the biggest one.

The board shown at the top of this page, read through. Invented data, not a customer.

Common mistakes

Walking the whole plant. Eight wastes in one process teaches more than eighty across the site.
Writing what you know instead of what you saw. 'Too much inventory' is knowledge; 'five days of coil at receiving' is an observation.
Skipping the size. A waste with no rough number cannot be ranked.
Leaving non-utilized talent empty because it is awkward. Ask an operator what they would change.
Collecting forty examples and fixing none. Vote, pick three, name owners.
Blaming the people at the station for the waste they work around. The waste is in the process; say so on the sticky.

How it works in Lean Studio

1
Start from the 8 Wastes Walk template: eight panels, one per waste, with the definition in each header.
2
Walk the process with the board open on a tablet, or straight after, and add a sticky per example with where it was seen and a rough size.
3
Vote on the examples worth fixing and move them to an impact/effort matrix or an action tracker.
4
Save the finished board to My templates so the next team starts from your version.

Lean Studio boards are drawn with stickies, text, shapes (rectangle, rounded rectangle, ellipse, diamond), arrows and charts, and any board can carry the 15 data widgets, from a scorecard to a kanban. See all widgets and boards.

Also in LeanSuite

Where it goes next in LeanSuite

In LeanSuite you build any audit checklist, schedule it, complete it on a phone or tablet and turn every finding into a tracked action.

Vision AI's time and motion study finds the wastes on video: each operator's time is split into value-added, semi-value-added and non-value-added with waste categories auto-detected, and findings become Kaizens in one click. AI Video Analysis
Idea Management's waste hunts log each opportunity by type of waste and size, and the best are approved into projects. Idea Management
The examples chosen for fixing become Kaizen projects with owners, due dates and tracked savings. Kaizen & Projects

See Audit Management

Open this board in LeanSuite

8 Wastes Walk is one of the 30 ready-made boards in Lean Studio, LeanSuite's whiteboard. Try the interactive demo in your browser with sample data, or pilot LeanSuite on your own lines for 90 days, with the setup done by our team.

See it in action Start a 90-day pilot

What Lean Studio is

Related boards and templates

In the lean glossary

FAQ