The 3 MU

In the lean world it is all about “WASTE ATTACK” > eliminate the 3 MUs. It is the bottom line of all KAIZEN and Lean activities. The 3 Mu come from the Japanese words muri, mura and muda. Muda is the most known as it describes waste and we discuss the 7 kinds of waste in the TIMWOOD article. Just to give you a hint TIMWOOD stand for: transport, inventory, motion, over production, over processing and defective parts. These kinds of waste are easily visible by observing manufacturing processes. It gets a little bit trickier if we talk about the other 2 Mu. Muda you get a straight forward feeling, mura and muri are more hidden. 

The best way to explain muri is that you are over stressing a system or process. If you e.g. use a forklift that has a maximum of 500kg and you are transporting 1 ton. Your forklift won’t last long. You are either overstressing or trying to do something that can’t be done. The result of it will be a loss in performance.

Mura is unevenness or variation of processes most of the time a result from muri. You can also compare it in administrative work, if you have too little or too much to do. To stick with the example of the forklift, mura would be having only 200kg to load on the forklift on one transportation and on the next route 1.400kg. The result of this variation may be that you try to load 700kg on each route even this is exceeding the max load. The result of it will be that you have breakdowns, defects, excessive motion and other wastes. In all lean management, whether it is manufacturing, logistics, healthcare or knowledge transfer focuses on getting rid of muri, mura and muda in order to improve performance. If you want to get rid of waste in a sustainable way, you have to go upstream and start looking at how products, services or the work itself is designed. You need Value Designing and Value Engineering in the widest sense of the lean terms.

A simple and easy way to make things visible is the classic GEMBA walk – go to the production and see what crime your designers and engineers have committed. Go Gemba helps you to identify and eliminate wasteful steps in assembly and set preventive measures such as Poka Yoke devices to ensure conformity of your products. If we think of designing work itself we want to achieve a continuous and smooth stream of activities. Having this in mind always helps us to redesign processes, get rid of rework, delays or overengineered process steps. Value Stream Mapping as it is done today and redesigning it to focus on fast, high quality hands-off will result in reduced costs and time to market lead times.

MURI in terms of the designing phase will be visible in the need of long working hours to meet the schedule. You will see that it also comes from MURA because the workload itself is not levelled. Who hasn’t been in the situation that you have a design release and suddenly you are twice as busy as before. In the end MURI and MURA leads to MUDA when we start making failures under the pressure of time, when we start releasing before everything has been fully tested or checked.

In the designing phase or let’s say in the creative phase it is typically hard for employees to judge what is waste and what not. It starts with unclear requirements from the customer, but yes some work needs to be done anyway. That’s one point and another one is the mainstream mindset that design is 100% creative and can’t be standardized or quantified. We all heard about Pareto which tells as that 80% of a project are carry over parts and 20% are individual solutions for the specific project.

Lean Design is more a mental rather than a technical challenge.

Carrying on with the example of lean product development, the focus should be to streamline the routine and repetitive work packages so that there is more time for the individual, creative, value-adding part of the project. To clean out your process standardization of items, design elements, documentation, software used and the wiki of Lessons Learned from other projects are just some methods to apply basic lean principles in the development process.

If you think about decentralization of organizations with a global presence, design teams usually suffer from inefficient processes and inadequate design review meetings. Think about standardization as an organization wide language to communicate. If everybody talks the same language you have transparency which rewards you with more time for the creative part.

Considering the cost of delays in time to market, troubleshooting during launch phase and failure occurrence in the field, the design team should think about the rule of ten according costs of failure.
Lean management is based on continuous improvements (kaizen) based on standards and lean design is no different.