Lean Supply Chain Management Essentials

Lean BasICs 21

turn leads to downtime, mistakes, and backflows—the muda of waiting, correction, and

conveyance. e inevitable result is that mura creates muri that undercuts previous efforts to

eliminate muda. In short, mura and muri are now the root causes of muda in many organi-

zations. Even worse they put muda back that managers and operations teams have already

eliminated once.

—James Womack Newsletter, July 6, 2006

Does it look like this for your company? How will you ever break this destruc-

tive cycle?

e other point to make here is that there has been a primary focus on muda in

the Lean efforts so far. As stated in the quote above, we need to address the other

two types of waste to gain long-term improvements. Supply chain managers are ...