As a Project Manager and continuous improvement devotee, I’m always looking for ways to make small tweaks that will make things better. Lean Manufacturing focuses on removing waste from manufacturing processes, but you can apply those same principles to your service business and to your home. There are a total of eight wastes that can be removed from processes, but today we will discuss removing overproduction.

Overproduction is defined as production that is more than what is needed or before it is needed. As with our last blog on defects, overproduction is easier to understand in manufacturing – you don’t want to manufacture more widgets than you can sell. Making each widget costs money for raw materials and manufacturing time, and so does paying rent on the space for storing it. In manufacturing, you want all production to be “just in time”, ideally manufacturing the widget and shipping it directly into the anxiously waiting hands of the consumer.

In one ingenious marketing ploy of the big box stores, consumers have been seduced by low cost-per-unit pricing into buying bulk quantities of everything from detergent to snacks. We then store them in our homes until they can be consumed (or thrown out due to spoilage), requiring us to buy ever larger homes for storing all our goods. In your personal life, shopping every day for what you need for that day would be the perfect example of removing overproduction.

How does removing overproduction translate to your service business? In a service business, overproduction is closely related to resource management. You want your available resources to closely match the work demand. This can be challenging depending on the nature of your business and the level of expertise required but, ideally, you want all your resources to be 80% utilized all the time. Why 80%? Because no one can be 100% productive. There are vacations, holidays, sick days, doctor’s appointments, internal meetings and training sessions, all of which impact productivity. Additionally, you want to staff your resources with the assumption that they will work an 8 hour day. If staff needs to consistently work 50, 60 or 70 hour weeks, they will become less and less productive for the time worked and they will burn out. In this gig economy, many companies flex their resources by hiring temporary resources during short-term booms and contracting during short-term busts. This contraction and expansion of your work force has risks, though, because each person who leaves takes with them important institutional knowledge.

Fixing overproduction in your business will improve so many things – your employee’s happiness, your customer’s satisfaction and your bottom line.