DOWNTIME on the Floor: A Field Checklist for Spotting the Eight Wastes
Lean defines value as what a customer would willingly pay for. Everything else is waste — and most processes are full of it without anyone noticing, because waste rarely looks like waste. It looks like a busy office, a full inbox, a stack of approvals. The DOWNTIME acronym turns the eight wastes into something you can actually carry through a process and check off. The eighth waste, non-utilized talent, was added to the original seven precisely because so much value is lost when people's skills sit unused — a point that landed hard in 2020, when capable teams spent weeks waiting on decisions that never came. Here is the checklist.
Walk the process with DOWNTIME
Defects. Work that has to be redone, corrected, or scrapped. Look for rework loops, returned files, and the quiet second pass nobody puts on the schedule.
Overproduction. Making more, sooner, than the next step needs. The report run weekly that someone reads monthly is overproduction in an office.
Waiting. People or work idle, waiting on an approval, a handoff, or a system. With hybrid teams, waiting now hides inside inboxes and 'awaiting reply' threads.
Non-utilized talent. Skilled people doing rote work, or whose ideas never reach a decision. The expert formatting spreadsheets is a waste of what they were hired for.
Transportation. Moving materials, documents, or data more than necessary. Every unnecessary handoff between systems or teams is transportation.
Inventory. Work sitting between steps — raw stock, half-finished cases, a backlog of tickets. Inventory hides problems and ties up cash.
Motion. Unnecessary movement within a task: hunting for a file across five folders, switching between six tabs to complete one action.
Excess processing. Doing more than the customer needs — extra approvals, gold-plated detail, the same data re-entered into three systems.
How to actually find it
Go to where the work happens — the gemba — and watch a real case move through, end to end. Waste hides in the gaps between the steps everyone describes.
Follow one unit, not the average. Trace a single order, file, or patient and note every wait, handoff, and rework along its path.
Ask the people doing the work. They know exactly where they wait and what they redo; they have usually just stopped expecting anyone to ask.
Separate the symptom from the waste. A backlog (inventory) is often caused by waiting upstream. Name the type, then chase the cause.
From spotting to fixing
Naming a waste is not the same as eliminating it, and not every waste is worth chasing — some is the unavoidable cost of doing business safely or to standard. The discipline is to make the waste visible, quantify what it costs in time or money, and prioritize the few that matter. A DOWNTIME walk done honestly will surface more than you can fix at once; that is a feature, not a failure. Start with the waste that touches the customer, fix it at the cause, and verify the gain before you move on.
If you suspect waste is eating your margins but cannot quite point to where, XNM's strategic advisory can help you map the process and target the wastes worth removing.