Walking is a Waste of Money

Waste is dripping off your operator’s brow – waste of time, energy, and money. You may think it is a sign of hard work. However, if you want more output and more profit, they need to work smarter, not harder. Factory production should be less legwork and more achievement – output. Achieving output and profit are the purposes of a factory and the company. A great way to improve your process is to eliminate walking. Walking is a waste of time, energy, and space which takes a big chunk of change out of your pocket.

Money can be saved when you save steps. In a MODAPTS time study, a step costs 0.645 seconds. Running with my scenario in Money is a Waste of Time of 50 steps per hour, the estimated cost of those steps is about $0.16 per hour. This is for an operator with an hourly pay of $17.50. The waste of this money by walking is devastating the company’s profit.

Energy is spent by your operators on the process. If their energy does not produce anything, you could have operators feeling like rats in a maze. Unappreciated employees look for more satisfying work, leading to unfavorable turnover rates at your factory. How much is the cost for a departure of an employee? “Each departure costs about one-third of that worker’s annual earnings.” Turnover has many soft costs and hard costs. Walking is wasting more than an operator’s time and energy; it is wasting their purpose.

Walking uses more space; more space equals more rent. Organized space not only helps with finding what you need faster but if everything is where it is supposed to be, you do not have to walk around to find it. Wasting your space because of disorganization means losing money from wasting time and having to replace lost items. Empty shelves and poor layout can cause operators to walk, and the process is disrupted. Inadequate use of space causes more money to be spent on space.

The summation of walking costing time, energy, and space leads to a load of money being wasted. Money is wasted in the misuse of the resources time and energy. Reasonably, $1.28 a day of steps should be eliminated from the process. Walking is not an efficient answer to achieving output. The space needs to be optimized for cost efficiency. The production process should be thoughtfully coordinated for output, profit, and achieving purpose.

Source: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/all-things-work/pages/to-have-and-to-hold.aspx