Reducing Motion Waste Can Maximise Efficiency in your Business Operations

When at work, are you moving more than working? Searching more than delivering value? Clicking more than producing? Reaching and bending and going home with a creak in your back and a sore neck?

Unnecessary movements in the workplace, whether with the body or machines, physical or digital, are called Motion Waste and it will cause more than a creak in your neck and a sore back, because wasted motion slows you down. It also costs you wasted time and productivity and, possibly, lost revenue and lowered morale.

In business and manufacturing, the "waste of movement" (often called motion waste) refers to any physical or digital movement by people or machines that does not add value to the final product. It is about how many movements people undertake, literally or digitally, to do their work. Wasted movements are, simply put, movements that waste time. 

How to spot Motion Waste:

Real-life examples of motion waste occur across almost every industry, as well as in everyday life. Next time you have a chance to look into a construction site early in the morning, see how many of the workers and craftsmen spend the first 30 minutes wandering around on a cluttered site, or walking to a distant job box to find the correct tools and equipment for the day.

Motion Waste in everyday life:

• Observe how many times a day searching for misplaced car keys takes place in your household, as well as searching for specific clothes or cooking utensils due to a lack of designated storage.
• While cooking, take a moment to notice how many times you have to walk back and forth between the fridge, the sink, and the stove, because the workspace and kitchen layout were poorly designed or organised.

Motion Waste in Offices and Administration.

Digital Motion Waste:

While a single unnecessary step or mouse click might only take a few seconds, the compound effect in real time is huge. The usual culprits are: 

• extra keystrokes, 
• excess mouse clicks, 
• scrolling up and down a computer screen, 
• manual data entry, 
• poor process design, 
• double entry of data.

Click-heavy software requires staff to navigate through 4 or 5 deep menu layers to perform simple tasks instead of using quick keyboard shortcuts.

Disorganised servers and folders require searching through unoptimised internal networks or local folders to locate a single document.

Product information is scattered across spreadsheets and systems, instead of an integrated process, requiring data re-entry—office workers re-typing the same information into two different, disconnected software systems.

Screen switching: Constantly alt-tabbing or toggling between 3 to 4 different disjointed applications to manually copy-paste data. 

Excessive email routing: Moving a digital document through long email threads and approval chains instead of using centralised version-control tools. 

Scattered, inconsistent product information causing excessive clicking through five different menus or to open multiple browser tabs to find a simple piece of information on a website or company server.

Physical Motion Waste:

Employees have to walk across the office multiple times a day, back and forth, because of:

• Decentralised supplies: walking to a distant communal supply closet or printer or to get to equipment, because of poor equipment placement.
• Poor desk ergonomics: Frequently having to bend, twist, or stretch to reach files, binders, or equipment because the workspace is cluttered/not laid out efficiently.
• Meeting room shuffling: Instead of virtual meetings, staff has to travel across buildings or take long walks to different floors for meetings.
• Shuffling through papers,  sorting through materials and through inventory to find what is needed.
• Searching for files. 
• No standard methods.
• Shared equipment and machines.
• Siloed operations.
• Stock transfers between locations are not tracked, resulting in extra steps for searching.

The Real Cost

• Fatigue and Injury: Repetitive and awkward movements increase the physical toll on employees, drain time and increase fatigue without advancing the task. 
• Lost Capacity: Time spent walking or searching is time not spent producing or delivering value.
• Lower Morale: Disorganised workspaces and repetitive inefficiencies directly frustrate team members. 

Conclusion: How to Eliminate Motion Waste

To identify and reduce these inefficiencies, it is recommended to review digital and physical workflows. 

In office administration employees should be able to complete their tasks and access needed data, files, websites, and software with little effort. A good lean method to manage this type of waste is to use document management systems, follow standardised processes, provide sufficient and relevant training to employees and deploy business process automation solutions. 

In factories and warehouses eliminating the waste of movement requires analysing real-time processes and employing the 5S methodology (Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain). This involves workspace optimisation, placing frequently used items at the point of use. The point being that no extra effort or motion is required to get the job done. 

Standardised procedures mean tools and information are exactly where they are needed.