Organisational efficiency
Companies generate value through creating and selling products. In order to achieve this they need to organise the utilization and combination of resources.
This organisation of the utilization and combination of resources should be → efficient, otherwise waste of these resources appears.
The 10 Mudas (wastes) in Organisations
Muda is the Japanese word for waste. Lean management defines the seven Mudas in operations:
-
Transport
-
Inventory
-
Motion
-
Waiting
-
Over-Processing
-
Overproduction
-
Defects
Similar to these well known Mudas in operations, there also exist Mudas in sub-optimal organisations which cause inefficiencies.1 The underlying thought concept is that companies are paying for resources. If the organisation of the company falls short of using these resources efficiently then obviously they are wasted to some degree.
These wastes or Mudas are:
-
Lack of overall purpose and according performance & progress measures · missing resource selection & control
-
Unclear structure · organisational overlap & redundancies · no ownership
-
Incompatible interests · false payment, reward, and incentive mechanisms
-
Lack of collaboration · silo thinking · area egoism · power games · friction
-
Missing information · un-SMART objectives · lack of communication · lack of knowledge · re-inventing the wheel
-
Information travel · authoritative decision making & overrule · hesitations
-
Lack of leadership & delegation · over-control · unused human competence or ingenuity · unnecessary bureaucracy
-
Lack of learning · slow problem solving · low quality · little fixes · repeat errors
-
Lack of adaptation, change, innovation
-
Organisational waiting time (due to bottlenecks) · slow decision taking
If management desires for its company to work more efficiently it needs to improve the current organisational system such that it reduces the waste.
Version v1.5.1
Footnotes
-
The 10 Mudas in organisations were developed by Prof. Dr. Ulrich Anders. ↩