The 8 wastes in companies nobody calls a business

The strapline I picked for Cadence Standard was this:

The 8 wastes exist in every business, even the ones nobody calls a business.

I picked it because the 8 wastes (DOWNTIME, depending on the book) are the most useful lens I’ve ever used, and almost nobody outside a factory has heard of them. Defects. Overproduction. Waiting. Non-utilised talent. Transport. Inventory. Motion. Excess processing.

The 8 wastes were written down at Toyota in the post-war years to describe how a car plant burned effort. But they describe every system that turns inputs into outputs. The labels work as well on a kitchen, a van round, or a Sunday-league football club as they ever did on a bottling line. The trick is to stop reading them as factory terms.

This piece walks the eight through three “businesses” nobody calls a business: a single-parent household, a one-van trades operator, and a Sunday-league football club running a kit-buy. The same waste shows up in all three. The labels are universal. The fixes are universal too.

The eight, in plain English

Before the worked examples, the eight in human language:

• Defects: work you have to redo because it wasn’t right the first time
• Overproduction: making more than the next step actually needs right now
• Waiting: somebody or something idle while waiting on something else
• Non-utilised talent: people doing work below their capability while their actual skill goes unused
• Transport: moving stuff between places that don’t add value to it
• Inventory: stuff sitting around that you’ve already paid for but can’t use yet
• Motion: people moving more than they need to in order to do the work
• Excess processing: doing more to a thing than the customer actually wants

Eight ways effort leaks out of a system. Some books call them seven; the original Toyota list dropped “non-utilised talent” because they took for granted you’d already solved that one. Most modern Lean trainers put it back in because most modern workplaces haven’t.

The single-parent household

The household is a small business that nobody calls a business. The “customers” are the kids. The product is them growing up safe, fed, slept, learning. The inputs are the parent’s time, money, attention, and emotional bandwidth. The framework applies cleanly.

• Defects: the school bag packed without the PE kit. The shopping done without the milk. The bath run before realising the towels are in the wash. Every household runs at a defect rate that would close a factory.
• Overproduction: the four meals batch-cooked on Sunday that the kids refuse on Wednesday. The piles of nappies bought when the size is about to change. The clothes hauled out for a child who can’t get them on yet.
• Waiting: most of the week. Waiting for the kettle. Waiting for the washing. Waiting for one child to finish the bath so the next can start. Waiting for nursery pickup. The biggest single category by hours in nearly every household.
• Non-utilised talent: the parent with a master’s degree spending forty minutes a day cutting fruit into quarters. (This isn’t a complaint. The fruit-quartering is necessary. But it’s a clean example of the model. If a child could safely cut their own fruit, the parent’s higher-value time gets freed up.)
• Transport: trips to the car park to fetch the thing left in the boot. Trips back upstairs for the dummy. Trips to the shop because the list wasn’t checked. A household runs on transport waste.
• Inventory: half-eaten jars of baby food. The unopened nappy boxes in the wrong size. The toy that was bought for a Christmas that hasn’t happened yet.
• Motion: rummaging through a drawer for the right pair of socks because the drawer has no system. Searching for the missing shoe because the shoes don’t have a home.
• Excess processing: cutting the toast into precisely-equal quarters when the child only needed it broken in two. Ironing what doesn’t need ironing. Polishing what the customer won’t see.

I’m partway through running my own family on this lens. Two kids under three, partner ten years younger than me, both of us tired from broken sleep for the best part of two years. The single biggest unlock was naming Waiting and Motion out loud and then doing one small thing about each.

A morning trolley with the day’s nappies, wipes, change of clothes, and ready meal already on it, parked next to the front door. Kills both Motion (no upstairs trips) and Transport (one journey from kitchen to door instead of three). Took us twenty minutes to set up. Saves us fifteen minutes every morning we leave the house.

This is the same SMED logic I used on a £40,000-a-week changeover. The parts trolley is the parts trolley. The line is the front door. The lens is the same.

The one-van trades operator

The self-employed plumber, electrician, decorator, gardener. A business of one or two, working from a Transit, charging by the day. Almost nobody in this category has ever seen a DOWNTIME chart, and the chart describes their working week with painful accuracy.

• Defects: the boiler that needs a callback because the part fitted on Monday was the wrong one. The radiator job that leaks because nothing was pressure-tested before the customer paid. Trades businesses run on word of mouth, which means defects don’t just cost the rework: they cost the next three jobs that were going to come from that customer’s neighbours.
• Overproduction: the bulk-buy of fittings that sits in the van for two years because the spec changed. The leaflets printed for a marketing push that never went out.
• Waiting: the morning spent at the wholesaler because the order wasn’t pre-picked. The afternoon spent waiting for the customer to be home. The week between quote and acceptance because there’s no system to chase. Wait time is the biggest single drag on trades-business profit, and almost nobody on a van measures it.
• Non-utilised talent: the qualified plumber driving to the wholesaler four times a week because nobody’s set up a stock system. The same plumber doing his own quote follow-ups on a Sunday night because there’s no admin support.
• Transport: the four trips to the wholesaler. The three trips back to the unit. The journey home because the right tool is in the second van.
• Inventory: the unused stock from a previous job rolling around the van floor. The materials bought speculatively for the kitchen refit that didn’t happen.
• Motion: rummaging through the van for the right fitting. Going up the ladder twice because the wrong tool came up first.
• Excess processing: polishing the joint twice because the customer “might notice”. Three layers of paint when the spec was two. The cleanup pass that should be ten minutes turning into forty because everything’s everywhere.

The fix for almost every one-van operator I’ve ever met is the same: a Friday afternoon stock-check, a pre-picked van load for Monday morning, a quote-follow-up rhythm on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Same Lean ideas. No factory.

The Sunday-league football club kit-buy

This one feels frivolous and I’m going to do it anyway, because it’s the most universal example of waste outside an obvious business.

A Sunday-league club kit-buy. Twenty players need shirts, shorts, socks. One person volunteers to organise it. The kit takes three months instead of three weeks. Half the players end up with the wrong size. The treasurer is still chasing payment from four people in March.

• Defects: the three shirts that came back with the wrong number printed. The two pairs of shorts in the wrong size because the spreadsheet column got muddled.
• Overproduction: the spare ten shirts the volunteer ordered “just in case” that nobody ever pays for.
• Waiting: the six weeks between the spreadsheet going out and the last player sending their size. The four weeks the printer sits on the order because half the deposits haven’t come in.
• Non-utilised talent: the qualified accountant on the team who never got asked to handle the money, while the volunteer who hates spreadsheets does it for three months.
• Transport: the volunteer’s car boot, full of kit, driving around to drop them off one at a time to people who couldn’t make training.
• Inventory: the boxes of kit sitting in the volunteer’s hallway for six weeks because nobody’s organised a pickup.
• Motion: the eight WhatsApp groups, the three spreadsheets, the four different conversations about the same colour of socks.
• Excess processing: the embroidered initials on each shirt that nobody asked for, that added ten days to the order.

The fix is again Lean. One person orders. One spreadsheet. One pickup day. Pay-on-order policy. No “just in case” stock. Kit done in three weeks for the same money.

Why this matters

I’m not writing this to convince anyone that running a household is the same as running a factory. It isn’t. The emotional load is different. The customer relationships are different.

But the system is the same. Effort goes in. Output comes out. The gap between the effort and the output is the waste. The waste falls into the same eight buckets every time.

The reason most people outside manufacturing never see this is that the language was built inside a factory and stayed there. “Overproduction” sounds industrial. “Excess processing” sounds technical. People hear the words and decide the framework isn’t for them.

It is for them. It’s for everyone running anything.

The biggest single mental shift I had in twenty years of operations was learning that “the 8 wastes” is not a manufacturing tool. It’s a thinking tool. Once you’ve installed the lens, you cannot un-see it. You walk into a coffee shop and watch the barista take three steps too many to make a latte. You watch a dentist’s reception desk and clock the queue at the door for fifteen minutes. You watch a school drop-off and see Waiting as the whole product.

Some of those operations would benefit from the framework being applied properly. Some wouldn’t. Sometimes the apparent waste is the point. (The coffee shop’s pace is part of the experience. The school’s queue at the door is partly a social thing.) The skill is knowing the difference.

But you can’t make the call until you’ve seen the waste. And you can’t see the waste until you’ve installed the lens.

How to install the lens this week

Pick a system you’re inside. The household. The freelance week. The volunteer commitment. Anything.

For one week, carry the eight labels in your head. When something feels frustrating, slow, or stupid, ask which of the eight it is. Don’t fix anything yet. Just name it.

By Friday you’ll have a list of fifteen or twenty things. Most of them will be Waiting and Motion, because those are the easiest to see.

Pick one. Fix it. Then read the list again next Friday.

That’s it. That’s the whole technique. It’s the same technique that turned a 95-minute changeover into a 34-minute one, applied to your kitchen.

The 8 wastes exist in every business. Even the ones nobody calls a business.

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