Waste of Time!

Are you or your team wasting time?  Wasted time costs money, creates inefficiency, and can lead to frustration at work.

There are eight areas of waste that can be remembered using the acronym DOWNTIME, these areas are:

Defects (broken equipment, poor quality feed)
Overproduction
Waiting (staff waiting for others or for equipment)
Non-Utilised Talent (not asking your team for input)
Transport (moving stuff around, e.g., hauling silage from one site to another)
Inventory (carrying too much stock)
Motion (poor design/layout of work areas)
Extra Processing (recording too much information that isn’t used)

To identify these areas of waste it is important to take time to look at each process on farm.  These could include feeding the cows in the winter, (from filling the feeder wagon to delivering the TMR to the trough), the milking routine, silage making, etc.  This process is called Value Stream Mapping, which, put simply, is about looking at each process on the farm and identify areas of waste in the process.  The process should involve the whole team, not just the business owner, to make use of everyone’s ideas and observations.  When carrying out the process you are looking for the following:

• Non valued added and not needed process or actions - eliminate
• Non valued added but needed processes or actions – reduce and/or simplify
• Needed and adding value – optimise

If you would like to look at carrying out this process on your farm,please contact Phil
on 07798 673665 or e-mail pcooper@fcgagric.com to discuss.​​​​​​​