Volume 1, Issue 1
An important requirement for a Muslim's life is to
be careful about time, to invest it wisely and to
benefit from it. In this regard, Ibn-ul Qayyim says,
"The highest, most worthy and most useful of reflection is what is intended for Allah and the Hereafter. There are various forms of reflection intended for Allah. One of them is reflecting on time duty
and function and focusing entirely on it, for the
knowledgeable one is the breed of his time. If he
wastes it, all his interests are wasted, for all interests arise from time. If he wastes his time, he can
never regain it."
Perspective :
I wanted to start this piece as "Lean Manufacturing", but soon realized waste is a problem not limited to manufacturing only - it is in every sphere of
life. Hence, I preferred to generalize it. 'Waste' is
the arch enemy of productivity, again not limited to
industry: office administration, school, hospital, retails, government machinery, religious institutions,
judiciary, manufacturing and the list can go on are
all places where you abundance of resources
wasted.
I recall my period of job of with state run mechanical design and manufacturing concern from a decade ago, few of the experiences of that period, I
would like to share with the readership of this article - I leave the judgment form industrial engineering perspective of these practices to the readers:
The manufacturing workshop was equipped
with state of art machine tools worth millions,
which used to sit idle for days, even weeks producing nothing. In addition, just a kilometer
away existed another machine shop with similar
level of machine tools sitting redundant. Never
understood, when both departments belong to
same organization, why duplication of resources?
We use to produce 3-5mm thick walled aluminum components out of solid 50mm thick
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aluminum sheets - wasting the machining time of
days, and scrap chips of 100's of kilograms. Not to
mention the working hours of operators.
The material store used to house an inventory
of raw materials ranging from expensive rods
and sheets of nylon, Teflon, Perspex, aluminum, mild and stainless steels - all sitting there
for well over 5 years. Again such duplicate
stores existed in other sister organizations
These are only few examples pertaining to few
machine shops and their associated inventory.
There were and are numerous such examples in
other departments too. Such attitude is especially
wide spread among all the state run institutions.
This brings us to the question - are we in collective nature neglecting the resource waste?
The corner stone to alleviate this attitude is realization of what is termed as waste? The concept of
'waste' and 'waste elimination' introduced by
Toyota manufacturing as methodology to improve
productivity is applicable to industrial and nonindustrial sector equally.
The Wastes: