--- name: eight-wastes-worksheet description: "A structured waste walk against the eight DOWNTIME categories — Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra-processing — tallied by category so the vital few show up, with any category nobody actually looked for named honestly. Use when: You're walking a real process — shop floor or office — and want to record what you actually see, tagged consistently, instead of a running list of complaints. You want an honest tally showing which waste category actually dominates, not a gut feeling about what's probably the biggest problem. Not for: You already know exactly what to fix and just need to plan the countermeasure — go straight to an implementation plan or A3; this worksheet is for finding the problem, not solving it. You're tempted to fill in every category just to look thorough — an honestly sparse worksheet, concentrated in the categories that actually apply, is more useful than a padded one." --- # Eight wastes (DOWNTIME) worksheet A structured waste walk against the eight DOWNTIME categories — Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra-processing — tallied by category so the vital few show up, with any category nobody actually looked for named honestly. Family: Foundations · Format: .xlsx · Domain: core ## What it is The eight wastes (DOWNTIME) worksheet is how a waste walk actually gets recorded: real observations, each tagged to one of eight standard categories, tallied so the vital few waste types stand out instead of a wall of anecdotes. DOWNTIME is Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilized talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra-processing. Seven of those are the wastes Toyota's production system named, as set out by Taiichi Ohno. The eighth, non-utilized talent (people's skills, ideas and creativity going unused), isn't one of Toyota's original seven: it was added later in Western lean writing and popularised mainly through North American lean books and training, which is also where the DOWNTIME memory aid comes from. Office and knowledge work tends to underweight it, even though it's often the largest waste. A category with zero observations logged is flagged honestly rather than hidden — it either means that waste genuinely isn't present, or it means nobody actually looked for it yet, and the worksheet says so rather than pretending the two are the same thing. Sources: Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (English edition 1988) for the original seven; later Western lean books such as Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way (2004), which lists unused employee creativity as an eighth waste. ## When to use it Use it when: - You're walking a real process — shop floor or office — and want to record what you actually see, tagged consistently, instead of a running list of complaints. - You want an honest tally showing which waste category actually dominates, not a gut feeling about what's probably the biggest problem. - You're kicking off a kaizen event or a Transactional Process Improvement (TPI) review and need real evidence of where the waste is before committing to what to fix. Not when: - You already know exactly what to fix and just need to plan the countermeasure — go straight to an implementation plan or A3; this worksheet is for finding the problem, not solving it. - You're tempted to fill in every category just to look thorough — an honestly sparse worksheet, concentrated in the categories that actually apply, is more useful than a padded one. - You haven't actually walked the process yet — this tool structures real observations, it doesn't generate plausible-sounding waste from a description alone. ## How to fill it in - **observations** — Describe the process and what you actually saw — a first-pass set of tagged observations gets drafted from that, for you to correct against what you really observed on the walk. - **coverage** — Computed for you from your observations — nothing to enter here. - **narrative** — Drafted from the worksheet actually built. - **nextSteps** — What will you do about the top waste category or a high-impact observation, ranked by impact and effort, owned and dated. ## What good looks like The example below walks Meridian Business Services' vendor invoice approval process: seven real observations concentrated in Waiting and Extra-processing, with Overproduction and Transportation honestly left at zero because this all-digital process genuinely doesn't produce either. Full worked example, on-screen and as a downloadable .xlsx: https://www.katafacts.com/katas/eight-wastes-worksheet ## Common mistakes - **Padding the worksheet to fill every category.** — A waste walk that finds real waste in three categories and honestly nothing in the other five is more useful than one that manufactures a plausible-sounding entry for every category — the empty categories are real information. - **Logging a generic complaint instead of a specific observation.** — "The process is slow" isn't a DOWNTIME observation — "invoices sit in the inbox for 2-3 days before anyone picks them up" is. A vague entry can't actually be acted on. - **Underusing Non-utilized talent.** — It's the easiest of the eight to skip — skilled people doing routine work below their capability rarely gets logged as "waste" the way a literal delay does, even though it's often the most expensive one. ## What it connects to Downstream: - **Makigami process map** (`makigami`) — Once waste is identified by category, a Makigami follows one real case step by step and shows exactly where — and in whose lane — each waste lives, with the waits and handoffs timed. - **Value stream map — current and future state** (`value-stream-map`) — A waste walk's findings are often the raw material a value stream map's current-state analysis draws on to compute where the flow is actually choked. - **Kaizen event charter** (`kaizen-charter`) — A concentrated cluster of high-impact waste in one category is exactly the kind of finding that justifies chartering a real kaizen event, not just a next-steps list. ## Where AI helps Judgement — stays with you: - Deciding whether an observation is really waste or a defensible part of the process - Deciding which category or observation to act on first Analysis — AI helps: - Drafting a first-pass set of tagged observations from a description of the process and what was seen - Drafting the narrative from the worksheet actually built Drudgery — automated: - Tallying observations by category, including which categories have zero - Flagging high-impact observations within each category - Exporting to xlsx in the house format --- Eight wastes (DOWNTIME) worksheet is licensed [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Attribution: Katafacts (katafacts.com). ## Using this skill Apply this method as part of whatever broader task, instructions, or deliverable you're already working on -- it's a method to use, not a standalone conversation to start. There is no generation tool for this catalogue yet, so draft the artifact's actual content yourself, following the fields above, the same way a person filling this out by hand would. The canonical guide page and a downloadable worked example (.xlsx) are at https://www.katafacts.com/katas/eight-wastes-worksheet.