Mura causes unevenness in allocating the workload for a production process, wherein a chain of linked events depend on one another. Organizations must ensure to allocate every process constituent with manageable tasks without causing bottlenecks down the line. The primary aim is to avoid delegating excessive work.
Understanding Mura’s Impact on an Organization
Businesses that operate on a stiff reporting structure with definite prerequisites set for the leadership workforce may witness Mura crawling into their production process at the end of specified periods. Moreover, if management only focuses on its assigned work quota, they could create additional workload (or Muri) for their direct reports. That would negatively impact the overall production chain and employees’ work performances.
In this situation, employees might lower their productivity or work morale or both, which resultantly complicate the process in the long run. That generally happens where we see an excessive amount of task completed by the end of a certain period, like a month or quarter. Resultantly, the following week will be slow with little or no work. Industry experts, like Janam Sandhu (a seasoned Lean Six Sigma expert), therefore suggest avoiding this one of the major types of waste.
An organization with minimal Mura can systematically allocate the production tasks, thus minimizing the productivity and performance chaos at the end of a specific time-frame.
Tactics to Combat Mura
To eliminate Mura, leaders must review the output of each production element and determine the average working pace of the different component of the production chain. The key is to reduce additional buffers within each task. Organizations must also ensure that no element in the production chain is ever starving for the desired resources.
Production irregularities lead to overproduction that adds to the process wastes. This excessive output needs to be assessed accurately, before dispatching it correctly to the next level in the production chain. Organizations may create additional storage or buffer facilities and must make efforts to manage those, more efficiently. That can, however, be problematic if the unevenness briefly spikes the production, which will make these additional storages completely redundant, in a short time later.
Conversely, resource starvation may result in workers rushing for the work and feeling overloaded, thus affecting the required attention on their primary tasks. Depending on the situation, it may not seem to be a concern immediately, but can be just as problematic later on. Ultimately, some production components of the organization would remain behind the primary schedule, as they tried completing the allocated auxiliary tasks to achieve operational and financial goals.
Businesses Must Eliminate Mura at an Initial Stage
Organization’s reporting structure may significantly impact the overall management of Mura. To efficiently handle the workload, allocated tasks must correspond with the current requirement and ability of the employees – at all hierarchies. Primarily, the analysis should seek to identify and reduce the needless components that could work against productivity in the long run.
For Instance – The need for a sales manager to achieve set targets, at the end of their current cycle, often creates additional pressure for everyone on their team. That pressure, however, is felt strongly at the lower levels. Given the work environment of a sales team, and the availability of modern performance evaluation tools, reducing those excessive workloads is often easier.
Dealing with Mura is, therefore, gets a-bit challenging when it creeps into the organization-wide functionalities. For this reason, it is crucial dealing with Mura from the very start - while laying the foundations of those functions.
Synchronizing Mura with the Organization’s Performance
Organization’s production outputs for the market are set usually by the current market trends and customers’ demands. That can make it quite tricky to design a production process that reduces Mura from the start, as the enterprises may have limited access to the relevant information at initial stages.
Each process component should, therefore, be developed, assuming that there will be a minimal possible demand. Enterprises must create additional resources or buffers only if one of the elements is aligned frequently with more tasks. Organizations may even modify the production chain to account for the rise in output.
Inference
In this competitive business environment, organizations must re-evaluate their working attitude towards their primary functionalities, including finance, accounting, sales, and others to effectively get rid of Mura. It is one of the most productive steps that help enterprises smoothen their work process and minimize the production waste created by an uneven allocation of tasks and resources. Eliminating Mura, along with Muri, make it much easier for businesses to deal with Muda later on.
The best approach to eliminate Mura, therefore, is to timely implement relevant measures in the fundamental structure of the organization. With a proper foundation, building the rest of the processes is easily manageable.
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