The Cost of Time?

Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.

"The easiest of all wastes, and the hardest to correct, is this waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material." ~Henry Ford

Henry Ford was talking about the waste of people's time, something we see plenty of in business: people waiting for the last part they need or the last piece of information required or the last person to arrive at the meeting. People's time is wasted in excess motion, and virtual mountains of time is wasted in rework. All of these are fairly easy to quantify.

But I think the costliest time-waste comes from delay in solving problems. Yes, ‘things take time.’ But how much time? And how much is the delay costing us?

The cost of each elapsed week it takes to solve a significant problem is:

• often quite substantial (sometimes equivalent to the annual cost of other problems your organization may also be working on)
  
• nearly invisible, because the costs are already buried in your baseline
  
• utterly irretrievable... there is no salvage. Every week that passes without the solution is another week of waste coming out of your bottom line. It is gone, sunk, kaput.
  

When you examine the timeline for an important improvement project, you will see many delays that could be eliminated with the appropriate attention to the bottlenecks.

If you have a problem worth solving (and who doesn’t?) why not ask yourself and the people around you “How much more is the problem costing us every week it goes unsolved?” For the vital few, put your best effort not just to solve it – but to solve it fast.

What is causing delays in your improvement projects?