Got "muda"?

Got what? Muda. It's Japanese for "waste." I didn't expect to pick up any foreign languages at the Field Service Long Cycle Forum in Atlanta this week, but "muda" stuck with me. As many of you know, muda is a foundational concept of Toyota's touted production system, originally developed by Toyota’s Chief Engineer Taiichi Ohno. The system has since spawned widespread adoption of lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and other process improvement programs.

According to Ohno's system, there are seven main categories of waste that can erode efficiency and profitability in a manufacturing environment: Material, Inventory, Transportation, Motion, Waiting, Overprocessing, and Overproduction. While Ohno's venue was manufacturing, service executives can apply the same concept to service and support, particularly as it relates to justifying a smart services strategy.

If your service organization is anything like some of the companies convened in Atlanta this week, post-sales product support issues are often resolved by "throwing people and parts at the problem." This is muda.

Consider this scenario: a machine goes down at a customer site, and based on the customer's description of the problem, you or your channel partner promptly dispatches a technician with a trunk-full of spare parts. The technician arrives on site, troubleshoots for an hour, swaps 4 or 5 parts one at a time until he determines which one is the culprit, and restarts the machine.

What's wrong with this picture? At least 3 or 4 flavors of muda, all of which could be averted with more timely and accurate machine activity data. To start, those handful of potentially new spare parts that the technician ruled out as the cause of the problem cannot simply be re-stocked as new parts. They've been used, albeit for a matter of minutes, and have instantly depreciated in value. This might not seem like much of a hit for a few parts, but if this is standard practice, it can add up in a hurry.

There's already elements of transportation-, waiting-, and motion-muda in this scenario, but what if the customer's diagnosis had been wrong and the technician didn't have the appropriate parts in trunk stock or even the appropriate skills or experience to fix the problem. You get the picture.

Try this exercise: lay out a complete process map for your service operation today, and try to identify and categorize all the muda. Look for wasted time driving, waiting, flying, diagnosing, etc. Or excessive overtime in certain regions or with certain field technicians. Or imprecise spares inventory decisions. And then in each case, try to quantify the value of the wasted resource or activity, and ask yourself if timely indicators of your products' history, performance, health, or other activities could have mopped up some muda. I suspect you'll find that muda is money.