The 7 Wastes in Office Work, Plus Muri and Mura: How to Find Them on a Flowchart

What Are the 7 Wastes and Muri, Muda, Mura? How the Two Ideas Relate

The 7 wastes sort "work that adds no value" into seven types. Muri, muda, and mura (the 3Ms) are three lenses on workplace problems: waste itself (muda), plus overburden (muri) and unevenness (mura).

The 7 wastes come from the Toyota Production System

The 7 wastes grew out of the Toyota Production System and are generally credited to Taiichi Ohno and his colleagues. The Toyota Production System rests on two pillars, jidoka (automation with a human touch) and just-in-time, and within that it aims to eliminate muda, mura, and muri.

It started as a factory idea, but what it really looks at is "time that creates no value for the customer." Time spent carrying parts and time spent walking documents from desk to desk are the same in that respect: neither creates value. That's why it works just as well in the office.

What muri, muda, and mura (the 3Ms) mean

Sources disagree on which of the three to tackle first. This article doesn't insist on an order: we look for all three together on the flowchart and start with whatever costs the most time.

How to remember them: TIMWOOD

In English, the 7 wastes are often memorized as TIMWOOD: Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, and Defects. (In Japan, people use a syllable mnemonic, "kaza-fu-te-tsu-do-u," covering the same seven.) The names vary slightly between sources — some say "making too much" or "defects and rework."

Minami

Process improvement lead

I sort of get muda, but once muri and mura show up too, I get lost... Do I have to hunt for all three separately?

Spark

DrillSpark consultant

The three are connected. When there's mura, the busy days bring muri, and to avoid muri you carry extra staff or "just in case" work — that's muda. So it's faster to look for them together on the flowchart than one at a time.

The 7 Wastes in Office Work: Factory Examples Translated to the Office

In the office, the 7 wastes hide inside everyday steps in a different form: re-keying data, waiting for approval, forms sent back, searching for files.

The 7 wastes side by side (factory example, office example, how it looks on a flowchart)

Of the seven, overproduction is generally considered the one to watch most closely. Making too much drags in the other wastes one after another: somewhere to keep it (inventory), effort to move it (transport), and time spent waiting on it (waiting).

What waste looks like when you draw the flowchart

The right-hand column of the table lets you hunt for waste by its shape on the diagram. Take a purchase approval for a PC or office equipment. Japanese companies often route purchases through a paper approval form (called a ringi-sho) that collects a personal stamp (hanko) from each approver. Draw that flow and tag each waste candidate in capitals, and you get the following.

In Figure 1, the waste shows up as a loop going back (send-backs), a place where work stops before the stamp (waiting for approval), steps handling the same content (re-keying), and an output with nowhere to go (the list). Inventory isn't drawn, but the stack of unprocessed request forms on the admin team's desks is exactly that.

The order of steps holds waste candidates too. Missing information is caught only after the stamps, and the purchase order is written before final approval. If the request is rejected, that purchase order is never used.

Your own work is no different. Draw the current steps on a single page, compare them against the right-hand column of the table, and you can tag the waste candidates.

The 7 Office Wastes in 3 Groups, With Examples

Grouping the seven into "stopping waste," "duplicating waste," and "searching and fixing waste" makes them easier to spot in an office. Rather than memorizing seven items one by one, you know exactly where on the diagram to look.

Stopping waste (waiting, transport): waiting for approval and handoffs

Stopping waste is time that passes while the work itself goes nowhere. In the office, that means time spent waiting for approval and time spent passing documents or data from one person to the next.

Say a department manager stamps approval requests in one weekly batch on Friday. The stamp itself takes 1 minute per request, but a request submitted on Monday sits for 4 days until Friday, and one submitted Friday evening waits until the following Friday. Stopping waste rarely shows up in work time, so the trick is to measure it in "days from receipt to completion."

Duplicating waste (over-processing, overproduction, inventory): re-keying, just-in-case documents, piles of paper

Duplicating waste is doing the same thing twice or making more than is needed. Typical examples are re-keying, such as copying a form's contents into a ledger, and reports that no one seems to use.

For example, 5 minutes of re-keying per item at 100 items a month comes to 500 minutes — more than 8 hours a month. Each instance is short, but multiplied by volume it becomes a lot of time; that's the hallmark of duplicating waste. And when the documents you produce pile up unused, they become inventory waste too.

Searching and fixing waste (motion, defects): hunting for things and send-backs

Searching and fixing waste is the extra effort that surrounds the actual work: time spent looking for files or old emails, and time spent redoing work after a problem is found.

For example, if finding files in a shared folder takes 10 minutes a day, that's 200 minutes over 20 working days — about 3 hours 20 minutes a month. A send-back uses the time of the person who redoes the form and of the person who checks it again, so each one weighs more than it looks.

• Question to find stopping waste: how many days does the document sit before this step?
• Questions to find duplicating waste: are we writing the same information twice? Who uses this document, and for what?
• Questions to find searching and fixing waste: how many send-backs are there a month? How many minutes a day go to searching?

Minami

Process improvement lead

Waiting for approval is up to the boss, right? I always figured there was nothing we could do about it...

Spark

DrillSpark consultant

Waiting time only becomes something you can discuss once it's on the diagram with the number of days written next to it. Changes to the steps — fewer approvers, or different approval routes by amount — are things anyone on the team can propose.

Muri and Mura in the Office: 2 Signs on the Flowchart

On a flowchart, muri shows up as "steps and decisions piled onto one person," and mura shows up as "branches or volumes that change depending on who or when."

Sign of muri: steps and decisions concentrated on one person

When you draw the diagram in lanes by person, sometimes one person's lane fills up with steps and decision diamonds. That's the sign of muri. When that person is off or swamped, the whole flow stops right there.

Sign of mura: branches that change by person, or volume that spikes at month-end

Mura comes in two kinds: unevenness by person and unevenness by time. The same decision goes "Yes" with one person and "No" with another, or volume jumps only at month-end or quarter-end. It's hard to see on the diagram alone, so check it with numbers as in the table below.

Muri and mura create muda (how to read the connection)

Say only one of the two admin staff can judge whether a purchase needs an approval request. When that person is out, intake of requests stops (muri). The other person doesn't know the criteria, so their send-back rate is higher (mura). And rewriting and rechecking those send-backs becomes defect waste.

In this way, muri and mura are often the cause of muda. If the root cause is decision criteria that live only in one person's head, we dig into that in "How to Reduce Key-Person Dependency." This article stops at spotting the signs on the diagram.

5 Steps to Find Waste on a Flowchart

Pick one process, draw the current flow, tag it with the 7 wastes, convert them into time, and rank them from largest to smallest. These 5 steps give you improvement candidates with numbers attached. In terms of the 6 steps in "How to Improve Business Processes," they cover visualizing the current state through identifying problems (Steps 2–3).

Step 1: Pick one process

Start with one process that has high volume, frequent send-backs, or overtime. The higher the volume, the more a small waste per item adds up to real time — and the more tangible the improvement.

Step 2: Draw the current flow as it really is

Draw the steps people actually follow, not the steps they're supposed to follow. Include the checks that aren't in the manual and the send-backs that happen only now and then. The waste is usually hiding in those unwritten steps. For symbols and the finer points of drawing, see "How to Map a Business Process Flow."

Step 3: Keep the table beside you and tag steps and arrows

Put the table from the previous section next to your diagram and compare it row by row against the "How it looks on a flowchart" column. Add the waste name after the step name — DEFECTS on an arrow that goes back, WAITING on a step that stalls before approval, and so on. Tag the steps and arrows, not the people.

Step 4: Write "time per item × monthly volume" next to each tag

Once tagged, write the time per item and the monthly volume next to each one, and multiply to get time per month. Rough numbers are fine. Asking the person who does it "about how many minutes per item?" is enough.

Step 5: Choose the ones with the most monthly time that are easy to start on

Finally, rank them by monthly time, largest first, and pick the ones that are easy to start on as improvement candidates. For wastes like waiting that don't show up as work time, record "days from receipt to completion" in a separate column.

Minami

Process improvement lead

Should I draw every process first and then look for waste?

Spark

DrillSpark consultant

One is plenty to start. Just drawing a single high-volume process usually turns up several tags. If you want to list everything your department does, take a look at "How to Do a Work Inventory."

Hand-drawn diagrams are fine. With DrillSpark, you describe the flow of the work in plain English and the AI drafts a flowchart, which you can then refine by chatting with it. You can try it on the free plan, with no credit card required.

Example: 6 Wastes Found in a Purchase Approval Flow, Converted to Time and Days

Take the purchase approval from Figure 1 and convert the tagged waste into time. In this example, the work time alone adds up to 16 hours 30 minutes a month — and it takes an average of 6 business days from request to final approval.

The company and the process (fictional)

Picture a 25-person company that sells machine parts. It handles 30 purchase requests a month — PCs, office supplies, software, trade-show equipment, and so on — received by a two-person admin team. Requests are paper forms that go through a section manager's stamp and a department manager's stamp, done in one batch every Friday, before the president gives final approval.

Converting the tagged waste into time

The math: transport is 10 min × 30 = 300 minutes, over-processing is 8 min × 30 = 240 minutes, defects are 30 min × 6 = 180 minutes, and motion is 5 min × 30 = 150 minutes. The 30 minutes per send-back is the requester's 20-minute rewrite plus admin's 10-minute recheck. That works out to 1 in 5 requests being sent back.

Waiting isn't work time; it's waste that stretches the lead time (the time from receiving a request to final approval), so it's recorded separately. In this example, a request takes an average of 6 business days from submission to final approval, about 4 of which are spent waiting for stamps. Because the department manager stamps only once a week, the wait for that stamp ranges from 1 to 5 days depending on which day the request goes in. Late orders also have knock-on effects on trade-show prep and sales plans.

Deciding what to fix first

The biggest monthly item is transport, at 5 hours. Transport and waiting both come from "collecting stamps on a paper form, one approver after another." So start from E (Eliminate) in ECRS and consider dropping the walk-around for stamps in favor of on-screen approval. Once requests arrive on screen, the department manager no longer needs a weekly batch and can approve them the day they come in. Splitting approval routes by amount at the same time — "under ¥100,000 stops at the section manager; ¥100,000 or more goes to the section manager, department manager, and president" — reduces the number of people anyone waits on.

Next is the 4 hours of over-processing. Build the log from the request itself so the data is entered only once (C: Combine). The 3 hours of defects is a candidate for R (Rearrange): move the check for the attached quote and completed fields to before the stamps. For the 2 hours 30 minutes of motion, make approved requests searchable from a list so the previous quote is easy to pull up (S: Simplify). For the 2 hours of overproduction, find out who uses the list and for what, and drop it if no one does. For the four ECRS principles and their order, see "What Is ECRS?"

Put the before and after diagrams side by side and you can see at a glance what disappeared and what moved. The 16 hours 30 minutes a month and 6 business days are figures from a fictional example; not every company will see the same reduction. For how to draw before-and-after diagrams and check the impact, see "How to Do an As-Is/To-Be Analysis."

3 Ways to Move Forward Once You've Found the Waste

Sort the waste you find three ways: if the cause is obvious, turn it into fixes with ECRS; if it isn't, dig in with a 5 Whys analysis; and if manual work remains that can't be eliminated, make it a candidate for automation.

When the cause is clear: generate fixes with ECRS

Waste with an obvious cause — "we wait because the form has to be carried around for stamps" — goes straight into ECRS. The basic approach is to work in the order E (Eliminate), C (Combine), R (Rearrange: change the order or the owner), S (Simplify), starting with "can this step be removed?"

When the cause isn't clear: dig in with a 5 Whys analysis

Sometimes you know there are 6 send-backs a month but not why the errors happen. For waste like that, keep asking "why?" to find where in the process the cause lies. The key is not to stop at "the person wasn't careful enough," but to dig down to causes in the process or the system.

Manual work you can't eliminate: make it a candidate for automation

Manual work that survives ECRS becomes a candidate for automation. Order matters: first check whether it can be eliminated, then automate what's left.

Minami

Process improvement lead

For re-keying waste, an RPA bot (robotic process automation) would fix it in one go, right?

Spark

DrillSpark consultant

Before that, check whether the re-keying itself can go away. Automating work you could have eliminated just makes the waste run faster. Automation is a tool for S, the last step in ECRS.

4 Common Mistakes When Removing Office Waste, and How to Avoid Them

Most office waste-reduction efforts stall for one of four reasons: blaming people, trying to do everything, not collecting numbers, and speeding up waste.

Mistake 1: Pointing out waste turns into "so-and-so is slow"

Once the waste hunt turns into "so-and-so takes forever to check things," people on the ground stop talking. The fix is to tag steps and arrows, not people. Write "work stops here for 4 days before this approval," and it becomes a discussion about the process instead of blame.

Mistake 2: Trying to map every process first, and stalling

If you try to diagram every process in the department before looking for waste, daily work tends to swamp you before you finish. The fix is to start with one process and one diagram. Once one diagram produces one improvement, you have a reason to draw the next.

Mistake 3: Calling something waste on impression and getting pushback

Say "I think this report is a waste" on impression alone, and the person who makes it will push back. The fix is to write down time per item and volume before you raise it, and to first find out who uses the document and for what. Something that looks like overproduction may be needed for audits or legal requirements.

Mistake 4: Automating work that could have been eliminated

If re-keying or tallying is painful and you automate it with a tool without changing the steps, work that could have disappeared lives on. The fix is to follow the ECRS order and start from E (Eliminate). Treat automation as the tool you reach for after trying to eliminate, combine, and rearrange.

Summary: Start by Drawing One Process and Tagging the Waste

The 7 wastes aren't just a factory idea. Waiting for approval, re-keying, and send-backs are all waste hiding in office procedures in a different form. Use the "How it looks on a flowchart" column of the table as your guide, and you can find waste candidates in your own work.

What matters is tying waste to steps, not people, and talking about it in terms of time. Then waste reduction stops being about blaming someone and becomes a conversation about making the process better.

Start by picking one process with lots of send-backs or re-keying, drawing the current flow on a single page, and tagging it with the 7 wastes.

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