The simplest way to describe Losses or waste is as “Something that adds no Value.” Our customers would not be happy to pay for any action that we take that does not add value to what they actually want and nor should we be.

Would you be happy if you received a bill in a restaurant that included a meal that was prepared in error? No; you would argue and demand that it was removed from your bill; yet if you buy a product in a store the price that you pay will contain costs that you would not want to pay. Would you want to pay for the machine operators wages whilst they sat idle waiting for a delivery, or for the rework processes that had to be undertaken because the machine was incorrectly set, or even for storing your product for three months before it was delivered to the store?  These Losses and wastes are included within the cost of your products, either inflating the price you pay or reducing the profit of the company.

Extra Processing Steps:  This occurs when it is hard to see when something is complete. For instance, grinding, sanding, and polishing can be overdone, because a sense of completion is hard to gauge from one person to the next. Redundant effort or steps, and excessive checking and verifying, are examples of extra processing steps. If operators need to unpackage parts from suppliers on the production line before installing those parts, they are extra processing steps.

Motion: Unnecessary motions are those movements of man or machine which are not as small or as easy to achieve as possible, by this I mean bending down to retrieve heavy objects at floor level when they could be fed at waist level to reduce stress and time to retrieve. Excessive travel between work stations, excessive machine movements from start point to work start point are all examples of the Losses and Waste of Motion. All of these wasteful motions cost you time (money) and cause stress on your employees and machines, after all even robots wear out.

Waiting: How often do you spend time waiting for an answer from another department in your organization, or waiting for a delivery from a supplier or an engineer to come and fix a machine? We tend to spend an enormous amount of time waiting for things in our working lives (and personal lives too), this is an obvious waste.
The Waste of Waiting disrupts flow, one of the main principles of Lean Manufacturing, as such it is one of the more serious of the seven wastes or 7 mudas of lean manufacturing.

Transportation:  Transport is the movement of materials from one location to another, this is a Loss or waste as it adds zero value to the product. Why would your customer (or you for that matter) want to pay for an operation that adds no value?
Transport adds no value to the product, you as a business are paying people to move material from one location to another, a process that only costs you money and makes nothing for you. The Waste of Transport can be a very high cost to your business, you need people to operate it and equipment such as trucks or fork trucks to undertake this expensive movement of materials.

Inventory:  Inventory costs you money, every piece of product tied up in raw material, work in progress or finished goods has a cost and until it is actually sold that cost is yours. In addition to the pure cost of your inventory it adds many other costs; inventory feeds many other wastes.
Inventory has to be stored, it needs space, it needs packaging and it has to be transported around. It has the chance of being damaged during transport and becoming obsolete. The waste of Inventory hides many of the other wastes in your systems.

Defect / rework: The most obvious of the seven wastes, although not always the easiest to detect before they reach your customers. Quality errors that cause defects invariably cost you far more than you expect. Every defective item requires rework or replacement, it wastes resources and materials, it creates paperwork, it can lead to lost customers.
The Waste of Defects should be prevented where possible, better to prevent than to try to detect them, implementation of pokayoke systems and autonomation can help to prevent defects from occurring uality errors that have become costly and were not prevented.