Waste

Any activity that utilizes equipment, materials, parts, space, employee time, or other corporate resource beyond minimum amount required for value-added operations to ensure manufacturability. These activities could include waiting, accumulating semi-processed parts, reloading, passing materials from one hand to the other, and other nonproductive processes. The seven basic categories of waste that a business should strive to eliminate overproduction, waiting for machines, transportation time, process time, excess inventory, excess motion, and defects.