Why the Focus on Eliminating Waste?
It is obvious that waste can be costly, but why emphasize eliminating waste as such a critical practice? Developing the discipline of regularly looking for and eliminating waste enables teams to remove nonvalue-adding work before it becomes a problem (as in the opening story). And this is the key: Find waste proactively and eliminate it before it becomes a visible problem. In almost all cases the costs associated with eliminating waste are lower the earlier it is addressed—and the gains from eliminating waste are likewise obtained earlier.
Traditional waterfall thinking tended to rely on process tuning and better resources to improve productivity. And tuning tended to happen in response to a problem, like ...
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