Most teams don’t struggle because they aren’t working hard enough. They struggle because they’re spending too much of their time on work that doesn’t actually add value. It feels necessary, but it isn’t moving the business forward.
One of the first things we do in an Operations Audit is look at your processes through the lens of value vs. waste. This simple shift in perspective can uncover huge opportunities to improve performance without burning out your team.
If you missed our previous post, What an Operations Audit Really Does (And Why It Pays Off Fast) explains how we uncover the root causes of inefficiency before automation ever begins.
What Do We Mean by Value?
Value-added work is anything that directly contributes to a meaningful outcome for your customer or business. It transforms something in a way that matters.
- It changes the form, fit, or function of a product, service, or data.
- It is done correctly the first time.
- The customer cares about it, needs it, or would be willing to pay for it.
Example 1: In a woodworking shop, cutting, sanding, and finishing wood are value-added tasks. These are the actions that transform raw material into a final product.
Example 2: In data reporting, value-added work means analyzing and interpreting trends that guide business decisions. It does not include copying and pasting data or fixing broken formulas.
Example 3: In customer service, providing clear answers or resolutions to a customer’s issue is value-added. Everything else is a potential delay.
Understanding what counts as value is important because it becomes the standard you use to evaluate everything else. A task should be questioned if it doesn’t meet the value-added criteria.
What Is Waste?
Non-value-added work, or waste, is everything else. It might feel routine or even necessary, but it doesn’t directly move the ball forward.
Example: If resolving a customer issue takes five back-and-forth emails, that extra communication is waste. So is the time spent looking up old cases, copying information between systems, or waiting on internal approvals.
Waste tends to pile up slowly. A workaround here, an extra check there, a few duplicated steps to keep things moving. Before you know it, entire workflows are bogged down by tasks that don’t serve the end goal.
The key is not just identifying waste but doing something about it. That’s what our audit process helps unlock.
Meet TIMWOODS: The 7 Types of Waste
To help identify waste systematically, we use a practical acronym from Lean: TIMWOODS. It represents eight types of operational waste that show up across workflows. These categories make it easier to spot the inefficiencies that slow you down.
- Transport: Unnecessary movement of materials or data.
- Inventory: Excess stock, backlog, or unused data.
- Motion: Searching for tools, data, or files.
- Waiting: Delays between steps or approvals.
- Overprocessing: Doing more than what’s required.
- Overproduction: Creating more than is needed, too early or too often.
- Defects: Errors that require rework.
- Skills Misuse: Having highly skilled people spend time on low-value or repetitive tasks.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of these with examples:
- Transport: Moving files from one system to another multiple times a day. Every transfer adds risk and consumes time without changing the data.
- Inventory: Storing multiple reports or versions of the same file just in case. It clutters systems and adds confusion.
- Motion: A team member clicks through five different apps to find a single client update. That time adds up quickly across a team.
- Waiting: A project is ready to go, but you’re waiting on someone else to sign off. Work stops, but the clock doesn’t.
- Overprocessing: Manually reformatting a report to match a specific template, even though the content is already approved.
- Overproduction: Sending out weekly performance reports when monthly is enough.
- Defects: Incorrect data entry that requires someone to go back and fix it, delaying other tasks.
- Skills Misuse: Having senior team members spend time on data cleanup instead of strategy development.
When we go through your processes during the Operations Audit, these are the patterns we look for. Even small examples of each can add up to a significant impact on performance.
Making It Real: Office Example
Let’s walk through a real-world scenario: A team is responsible for generating a monthly product performance report used by leadership to make inventory, pricing, and vendor decisions.
The value-added work?
Analyzing performance trends. Communicating clear KPIs. Helping the business make better decisions.
But before they can even get to that point, here’s what their day-to-day often looks like:
- Moving data between vendor portals, FTP sites, Excel files, and internal systems—sometimes multiple times a day.
- Tracking down the right files, clicking through several tools just to verify one number.
- Storing multiple versions of the same spreadsheet “just in case.”
- Waiting on approvals or for systems to refresh before they can move forward.
- Reformatting reports to match outdated templates.
- Syncing product lists that haven’t changed, just because it’s part of the monthly process.
- Fixing errors from bad copy/paste or mismatched formats.
- Tying up analysts with formatting and troubleshooting instead of insight and action.
None of that adds value. It burns time, creates risk, and delays the real reason the process exists—to inform decisions.
Why This Matters
Cutting value-added time in half gives you some savings. But cutting waste in half often delivers much more. That’s because waste usually makes up the majority of total effort in a broken or unrefined workflow.
You could work faster. Or you could work smarter by eliminating the work that doesn’t matter.
Once we identify waste, we can look for ways to reduce, eliminate, or automate it. That doesn’t just make things more efficient; it also makes them more effective. It frees up your team to focus on work that truly matters. You get more done, faster, with less frustration.
A Final Analogy: Woodshops and Workflows
In a woodshop, time spent cutting, sanding, and finishing wood is value-added. Time spent walking to get materials, waiting for glue to dry, or cleaning up is not. You still have to do some of those things, but they aren’t where you want to invest most of your time.
Your business works the same way. During the Operations Audit, we help you identify those hidden sources of waste so you can streamline your workflow and get more value from every hour of work.
A Better Way to Work
Shifting your perspective from “doing the work” to “doing the right work” is a game-changer. When teams understand what really adds value, they can spend more time there and less time spinning their wheels.
The best part? You don’t need a complete overhaul. In many cases, identifying and eliminating just a few common wastes leads to measurable gains in time, cost, and employee satisfaction.
In the next post, we’ll dive into the tools and techniques we use to reduce waste and improve performance without overwhelming your team.
Want help spotting hidden waste in your workflows? Learn more about our Operations Audit service or reach out to get started.
