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42 SMT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2024 ees (rather than the throughput of machines), capacity can be limited by available staff. While the answer is to hire more people, that is not an easy or quick solution given the difficulty of hiring the right staff and the time it takes to train them. In Lean and 5S, we talk about the eight wastes. To find hidden capacity in your workforce, focus on eliminating four of these wastes. When you do so, you will increase your productivity and probably make the job of your front-line team easier and less frustrating. e four wastes to look for are unnecessary motion, over-processing, transportation, and wait times. Unnecessary motion is the easiest to spot. As a rule of thumb, each step of each member of your team takes one second. Add up all the steps your staff takes daily, which is a lot of time. Start with the most obvious motion waste. If you find your operators in the office searching for information or in the warehouse searching for parts, that tells you something has gone wrong. Operators should not have to leave their workstations to find parts, tools, or information. Look at the task design: Is the walking your operators do to complete their tasks necessary, or are things they need daily located in inconvenient places? Practical 5S® can really help identify and eliminate unneces- sary motion. e next target is transportation. By bringing processes closer together, reducing big batch sizes, and creating one piece flow, you can eliminate much of the need to transport mate- rials around your factory. A spaghetti flow map can show you where your team needs to go and highlight obvious opportunities to improve the location of vital materials. is can be a huge opportunity in a warehouse where the items most oen picked should be kept close to where orders are collated. Waiting is harder to spot, so look for unbal- anced processes where the cycle time of one process is much longer than the other. is usually means that the person with the shorter process will have to wait at some point for the other person to catch up. Another form of waiting I refer to as "machine staring." at is, operators staring at an automated machine watching it operate while they are waiting for a machine to complete its cycle. Instead, this time can be used for tasks that might be com- pleted when the machine stops. Such examples include preparing packaging, assembling com- pleted parts, preparing the setup for the next job, or assisting the operator with the slower cycle time. Finally, challenge yourself about whether the task is really needed at all. Is it truly value- added or is it just over-processing? We define over-processing as a task that does not add value to the customer. Typical examples of over-processing include unnecessary inspec- tion or QC checks, work-in-progress packag- ing, and de-burring or cleaning parts when improvements in the upstream process could eliminate the issues in the first place. Summary For your business to grow, it must increase capacity. However, most businesses have hid- den production capacity that can be obtained without the need for additional machines, people or buildings. For a holistic approach to understanding your capacity, we use a value stream map. Our facility layout development process™ is a structured and effective way to find ways to make the most of your space, human capacity, and machine capacity. In the past year, we have seen our customers increase productivity by more than 200% and reduce factory footprint by more than 50%. Finding your hidden capacity really can transform your business. SMT007 Timothy McLean is managing director of TXM Lean Solutions Pty. Ltd.