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Imagine that you have the task of stuffing, addressing, and mailing 100 envelopes for a community fundraiser. You start by folding all of the letters; focusing on completing that first before stuffing the envelopes.

Your friend also has a stack – and a different approach – completing one stuffed envelope at a time.

One at a time?! They’ll be there for hours after you’re done!

Right?

In the book Lean Thinking, James Womack and Daniel Jones put this envelope stuffing example to the test to see which approach would finish first – batch production or single piece flow. The results, proven in multiple studies and even a video, consistently show that single piece flow (one envelope completed at a time) is FASTER. (wow!)

Overproduction

Meet the biggest and baddest of the 8 wastes of Lean – Overproduction.

Overproduction is producing more than necessary.  Toyota, known worldwide for their Lean production system, considers this the worst waste because it hides or generates other wastes.

Overproduction can occur when we work in large batches (e.g. the letter example), when the time to change processes takes a while so we produce more for each type of task, or when we have the time to produce more because we believe it will be used at some point.

Here are some reasons why overproduction is so bad:

• Items need to be stored and retrieved later, costing time and money.
• Errors found after a large amount of work is done will cause scrap and / or rework.
• Items can become obsolete if they are stored too long.

Back to stuffing envelopes…

When you produce a large batch at once, think of how you need to stack, sort, and move piles of letters and envelopes.  This takes additional time.

What if you folded all of the letters, but found out that they were folded a bit too large to fit inside the envelope?  Instead of reworking one letter and folding correctly for subsequent, you now have to rework or scrap everything.

What if you got a call that now only 75 envelopes need to be stuffed and the other 25 letters will be used elsewhere?  This is a hard adjustment to make if you’ve already produced a large batch.

How Overproduction Relates to You

As long as we look at everything we do as a process, we can identify the wastes that are occurring – regardless of if we work in a manufacturing facility, in an office, or online.  Waste doesn’t discriminate – it’s in every workplace.

Here are some examples of overproduction that apply to most workplaces:

• Sending emails or reports more frequently than needed or to more people than necessary.
• Having more than one person managing a single task or team.
• Completing all of one type of task (e.g. completing all of the design or development) and pushing everything at once to the next person.  What happens if there are issues or changes needed at that point?
• Collecting the same data in multiple places.
• Stocking up on supplies.

The first step in stopping overproduction is to recognize it.