TIM WOODS is a memory aid for the eight wastes of lean: Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects and Skills. Each letter names a way time and money leak out of everyday work without adding anything a customer would pay for. The first seven come from Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System. Skills was added later. This guide explains each waste with examples from offices and IT teams rather than factory floors, shows how to run a waste walk in about 90 minutes, and gives you a free Excel audit that puts a £ figure on what you find.
Key takeaways
- TIM WOODS = Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects, Skills. In lean thinking, “waste” (the Japanese word is muda) is any activity that uses time or money without creating value for the customer.
- TIMWOOD is the original seven. DOWNTIME is the same eight wastes in a different order, with Skills called “non-utilised talent”.
- The wastes are not only a factory idea. In an office they show up as unread reports, approval queues, unused software licences, data typed in twice and staff whose ideas nobody asks for.
- The Lean Enterprise Institute calls overproduction the worst waste, because making too much, too early, creates most of the others.
- You don’t need software, a consultant or a Lean Six Sigma belt to start. One process, a 90-minute walk and the free waste-audit template are enough.
What does TIM WOODS stand for?
TIM WOODS stands for the eight wastes of lean: Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects and Skills. “Lean” is a way of running work, developed at Toyota, that focuses on delivering what the customer values with as little waste as possible. The acronym is a checklist you can hold in your head while you look at how a job actually gets done.
The eight wastes of lean as they show up in an office or IT team. Skills is the later addition to Ohno’s seven.
| Letter | Waste | In one line | Office or IT example |
|---|---|---|---|
| T | Transport | Moving work or information more than it needs to move | An invoice emailed, printed, scanned and emailed again |
| I | Inventory | Holding more than you need right now | Software seats paid for but unused; a backlog of half-finished jobs |
| M | Motion | People moving or clicking more than the work needs | Hunting through shared drives; switching between six apps for one task |
| W | Waiting | Work stopped until something else happens | A purchase order waiting three days for a signature |
| O | Overproduction | Making more, or sooner, than anyone needs | A weekly report that nobody opens |
| O | Over-processing | Doing more than the customer values | Three sign-offs for a £40 purchase |
| D | Defects | Errors that cause rework | A wrong address keyed in, so the delivery comes back |
| S | Skills | People’s knowledge and ideas left unused | A capable analyst spending half the week on copy-and-paste |
Where do the 8 wastes of lean come from?
The first seven wastes come from Taiichi Ohno, the Toyota engineer who built the Toyota Production System, and appear in his book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (published in Japanese in 1978 and in English in 1988). The Lean Enterprise Institute describes them as “Taiichi Ohno’s categorization of the seven major wastes typically found in mass production”. That list is TIMWOOD.
The eighth waste, Skills (also called unused talent or non-utilised talent), has a less tidy history. It does not appear in Toyota’s own list, which stays at seven. It was added in Western lean writing as lean spread from factories into offices and healthcare, and Jeffrey Liker’s widely read The Toyota Way (2004) is often credited with popularising it as “unused employee creativity”. The Kaizen Institute is candid that exactly when and how it was added “is not clear”. Some pages claim Toyota itself introduced eight wastes; we have not found a reliable source for that, so treat it with caution.
For an office or IT team, the eighth waste is arguably the most useful of the lot. In a factory, a machine sets the pace. In an office, people do, and the ideas of the person doing the work are usually the cheapest improvement available.
The 8 wastes explained, with office and IT examples
Each waste below has a plain definition, the signs to look for in a small business or office, an example from an established operation, and a first fix that costs little or nothing.
T: Transport
Transport waste is moving work, materials or information from place to place more than the job needs. In a warehouse it is pallets shuffled between bays. In an office it is information handed from system to system and person to person, with a chance of delay or error at every handoff.
- Signs: attachments forwarded on with “see below”; data exported from one app and imported into another; a request that passes through four inboxes before anyone acts on it.
- Established-business example: after an office move, the post still goes to reception, gets scanned, emailed to accounts and saved to a folder, when the supplier could email the invoice straight to an accounts inbox.
- First fix: map the handoffs for one document and remove any step where nothing is added.
I: Inventory
Inventory waste is holding more of anything than you need right now, whether that is stock, work in progress or paid-for capacity. Stock ties up cash and space. In an office the inventory is often invisible: half-finished jobs, an inbox of 3,000 unread emails, and software subscriptions for people who left last year.
- Signs: a backlog nobody can explain; software licences (paid-for user seats) with no recent log-ins; spare laptops in a cupboard; boxes of printed brochures with an old address.
- Established-business example: a stocktake shows £8,000 of a product line that sells four units a month, ordered in bulk for a discount that the storage and the cash tied up have long since cancelled out.
- First fix: pull the user list from your main SaaS tools (SaaS means software as a service, the kind you pay for monthly) and cancel unused seats at renewal.
M: Motion
Motion waste is unnecessary movement by people while they do the work: walking, reaching, searching and, in an office, clicking. Where transport moves the work, motion is the person moving around it.
- Signs: staff asking “where’s the latest version?”; walking to a shared printer for every document; logging in to the same system several times a day; copying a password from one place to another.
- IT example: a support technician uses five different tools to set up one new starter, re-typing the same name and email address in each.
- First fix: agree one folder structure and stick to it. Our project folder structure template is a free starting point.
W: Waiting
Waiting waste is any time the work sits still because it needs something before it can move on: an approval, information, a reply or a slow system. Waiting is often the biggest office waste and the hardest to see, because the person waiting is usually busy with something else.
- Signs: “I’m waiting to hear back”; purchase orders queued for one person’s signature; tickets marked “awaiting customer”; month-end held up by one late spreadsheet.
- Established-business example: when switching to a new supplier, the first order waits a week because credit checks, bank details and a signed contract are requested one after the other rather than at the same time.
- First fix: set a sign-off limit so small, routine items don’t need senior approval. If you raise purchase orders, our guide to purchase order numbers covers sensible approval levels.
O: Overproduction
Overproduction is making more of something, or making it sooner, than anyone needs. The Lean Enterprise Institute calls it the worst form of waste, because it generates and hides the others: surplus has to be moved, stored, checked and sometimes thrown away.
- Signs: reports produced on a schedule nobody remembers agreeing; a forty-slide deck where four would do; work started before the customer has confirmed it.
- Established-business example: a big new contract triggers a full set of bespoke procedures before the first order has arrived, half of which change once the work starts.
- First fix: stop one regular report for a month and see who asks for it.
O: Over-processing
Over-processing is doing more work than the customer values: extra steps, extra checks, extra polish or a higher standard than the job requires. It often starts as a sensible safeguard after one mistake and stays long after the risk has gone.
- Signs: three sign-offs for a £40 purchase; the same customer details entered in the accounts system, the CRM (customer relationship management system) and a spreadsheet; documents formatted beautifully for internal readers who only need the numbers.
- IT example: every password reset needs a manager’s email approval, adding a day of waiting and an hour of admin each week for a low-risk task.
- First fix: for each check in a process, ask what went wrong that made someone add it, and whether it still could. Some checks are required by law or regulation, such as anti-money-laundering ID checks in an accountancy practice. Lean treats these as necessary waste: you can make them faster, but you can’t remove them.
D: Defects
Defect waste is anything done wrong that has to be checked, corrected or redone, plus the cost of the mistake reaching the customer. In an office, defects are mostly information errors.
- Signs: credit notes for wrong invoices; deliveries returned to an old address; a handover where the new owner has to rediscover what was agreed.
- Established-business example: during seasonal recruitment, temporary staff are set up with the wrong pay rate because the details were copied from an email into the payroll system by hand.
- First fix: enter data once, at the source, and let other systems pull from it. A short standard operating procedure (SOP, a written step-by-step for a routine task) stops the same error recurring.
S: Skills
Skills waste is failing to use people’s knowledge, abilities and ideas, whether by giving skilled staff low-value tasks or by never asking them how the work could be better. It is the only waste that was not on Ohno’s original list, and in a small business it is often the one that costs most.
- Signs: qualified staff spending hours on data entry; suggestions that disappear without a reply; a team that knows a process is broken but assumes nobody wants to hear it.
- IT example: the person who could automate a weekly export with a short script has never been asked, so it is still done by hand every Monday.
- First fix: at the end of every waste walk, ask the people who do the work: “If you could change one thing about this, what would it be?” Then act on at least one answer.
Digital waste: TIM WOODS in a modern office
Most office waste today is digital, so it helps to read each TIM WOODS letter as something that happens on a screen. The original wastes were described for physical production; the categories still hold, but the evidence looks different.
| Waste | Digital form | Where to look |
|---|---|---|
| Transport | Copying data between apps; files moving through email, chat and drives | Any process with an export and an import |
| Inventory | Unused licences, duplicate subscriptions, storage full of files nobody will open | Card statements and SaaS admin panels |
| Motion | App-switching, repeated log-ins, searching for the right version | Watch someone complete one task end to end |
| Waiting | Approval queues, slow systems, tickets awaiting a reply | Helpdesk and finance queues |
| Overproduction | Automated reports and alerts nobody reads | Scheduled reports, notification rules |
| Over-processing | The same record kept in several systems; approvals for low-risk changes | Customer, supplier and staff records |
| Defects | Mis-keyed data, broken integrations, out-of-date records | Returned post, bounced emails, credit notes |
| Skills | Manual work that a capable colleague could automate | Ask: “what do you do every week that a computer could do?” |
A useful rule of thumb: whenever the same piece of information is typed by a human more than once, at least three wastes are present at the same time, usually transport, over-processing and defects.
TIMWOOD vs TIMWOODS vs DOWNTIME: what’s the difference?
TIMWOOD, TIM WOODS and DOWNTIME describe the same wastes; they differ only in whether the eighth waste is included and in the order of the letters. You will meet all three, and they are interchangeable.
| Acronym | Wastes | Covers | Where you’ll see it |
|---|---|---|---|
| TIMWOOD | Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects | Ohno’s original seven | Classic lean and Toyota Production System material |
| TIM WOODS (TIMWOODS) | The seven above, plus Skills | All eight | UK training and most lean guides |
| DOWNTIME | Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilised talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Extra-processing | All eight, reordered | Lean Six Sigma courses, US material |
Pick whichever acronym your team will remember. The mnemonic matters far less than actually going and looking.
Muda, mura and muri: the three Ms behind the wastes
Muda is the Japanese word for waste, and it is one of three related ideas lean practitioners call the “three Ms”: muda, mura and muri. TIM WOODS covers muda only. The other two explain why muda keeps coming back. Definitions here follow the Lean Enterprise Institute lexicon.
- Muda (waste): any activity that consumes resources without creating value for the customer. The eight wastes are the types of muda.
- Mura (unevenness): work that arrives in peaks and troughs. Office example: invoicing that is quiet for three weeks, then crushes the accounts team at month-end, which then causes waiting and defects.
- Muri (overburden): asking people or systems to do more than they reasonably can. IT example: one person who is the only one able to fix the server, approve the change and reset the passwords, so everything queues behind them.
The practical point: if you remove muda but leave mura and muri in place, the waste tends to return. Smoothing the workload and spreading knowledge are often the fixes that make the others stick.
Which of the 8 wastes is the worst?
In classic lean thinking, overproduction is the worst waste, because producing too much or too early creates the others. Surplus has to be stored (inventory), moved (transport), checked (over-processing) and sometimes scrapped (defects).
In a small office, the waste that costs most in practice is often waiting or skills. The honest answer is that it varies by business, which is why the template below asks you to put a £ figure on each waste rather than relying on a general rule. Once you have figures, the 80/20 rule usually applies: one or two wastes will account for most of the cost.
Lean tools that tackle each waste
Lean has a small set of standard tools, and each one targets particular wastes. You don’t need all of them, but the names come up constantly, so it helps to know what they mean in an office.
- 5S (sort, set in order, shine, standardise, sustain): a routine for keeping a workspace tidy so things are always where people expect. In an office, apply it to shared drives and inboxes. Cuts motion.
- Poka-yoke (Japanese for mistake-proofing): design a step so the error can’t happen, such as a drop-down list instead of a free-text box. Cuts defects.
- Kanban (a visual board that limits how much work is in progress at once): makes queues visible and stops new work starting until there is capacity to finish it. Cuts inventory, overproduction and waiting.
- Value stream mapping: drawing every step of a process with the time each step takes and the waits in between. It goes further than the waste walk below, measuring how long work waits between steps. Best for exposing waiting and transport, though it shows all eight.
- Kaizen (Japanese for continuous improvement): small, regular improvements suggested by the people doing the work. The natural remedy for skills waste.
How to run a waste walk in an office or IT team
A waste walk is a short, structured observation of one process, done where the work happens, to spot and record waste. Lean practitioners call the place where work happens the gemba (Japanese for “the real place”), so you may also hear it called a gemba walk. For an office it means watching the real work on real screens, not discussing it in a meeting room.
A waste walk takes about 90 minutes, plus a check 30 days later.
- Pick one process. Choose something that runs every week and that people grumble about: a customer order, a new starter’s set-up, month-end invoicing, raising a purchase order. One process is enough for a first walk.
- Walk it end to end. Two or three people, about 90 minutes. Follow one real piece of work from the moment it is requested to the moment it is done. Watch and ask questions; resist redesigning anything on the spot.
- Log every waste you see. Write each one against a TIM WOODS letter, with where it happened and roughly how often.
- Score and cost it. Score each waste 0 (not seen) to 3 (severe, daily or costly) and estimate the hours it costs per week. The template converts that into a yearly £ figure.
- Fix the top one or two. Choose the costliest waste with the cheapest fix. Give it an owner and a date. Trying to fix all eight at once usually fixes none.
- Check again in 30 days. Re-walk the same process. Keep what worked and write it into a standard procedure; a lessons learned log is a simple way to record what changed. Then pick the next waste.
Two habits make waste walks work. First, blame the process, not the person: people work around broken processes, and they will stop telling you about the workarounds if it gets them into trouble. Second, ask the person doing the job before you suggest a fix. That is the S in TIM WOODS at work.
Worked example: what waste costs a 12-person practice
Putting hours and pounds against each waste turns a vague sense that things are slow into a figure a business owner can act on. The example below is illustrative, not a real client: an accountancy practice of 12 people auditing its new-client onboarding. The figures are invented to show how the arithmetic works, and the same example is filled in on the second tab of the template.
| Waste | What the walk found | Hours / week | £ / year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Waiting | Standard engagement letters wait two days for partner sign-off | 4 | £5,520 |
| Transport | Client ID documents emailed, saved, then re-uploaded | 3 | £4,140 |
| Motion | Three versions of the engagement-letter template on the shared drive | 2.5 | £3,450 |
| Defects | Mis-keyed client details cause bounced letters | 2 | £2,760 |
| Inventory | Six unused software seats (£1,440 a year) plus parked onboardings | 0.5 | £2,130 |
| Overproduction | Weekly status report rarely opened | 1.5 | £2,070 |
| Over-processing | Client details typed into three systems | 1.5 | £2,070 |
| Skills | A junior’s checklist idea never picked up | 1 | £1,380 |
| Total | 16 | £23,520 |
The arithmetic is hours per week × an hourly cost of £30 × 46 working weeks, plus any direct cost such as the unused licences. Sixteen hours a week is about 43% of one full-time person. None of the fixes needs new software: pre-approving the standard letter, a single upload route for clients, one master template, and entering client details once. Use your own hourly cost; a reasonable figure is salary plus employer National Insurance and pension, divided by the hours worked in a year.
Do you need software, a consultant or a lean qualification?
No. A first waste walk needs a pen, the template below and a willingness to watch how work is really done. The tools and qualifications are worth paying for only once you have used the simple version and run out of road.
- Free: a waste walk and a spreadsheet. Enough to find and cost the obvious wastes in most small businesses. Start here.
- Low cost: introductory lean training. Short “Yellow Belt” style introductions to Lean Six Sigma are widely available online, some of them free, and are useful if you want a shared vocabulary across a team.
- When it hurts: process-mapping or workflow software. Worth considering once you are improving several processes at once and a spreadsheet becomes hard to keep current.
- Larger change: outside help. A consultant earns their fee on a big, cross-team change such as merging two offices or replacing a core system, not on finding the unread report.
For the wider picture of running a small business well, see our business principles and advice guide, and for turning time saved into margin, 53 ways to increase profit in a small business.
Download the free TIM WOODS waste audit template
Free Excel waste audit, no email required. One row per waste, with prompts for what to look for, a 0–3 score, hours lost per week and live formulas that work out the yearly £ cost and rank the wastes for you.
- Waste audit tab: blank and ready for your first walk.
- Worked example tab: the accountancy practice above, filled in, so you can see how it works.
- Download the TIM WOODS waste audit (Excel, .xlsx)
UK format, opens in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice. Made for small businesses; no email needed to download. Version 1.0, October 2026.
Get an email when we update the template. We will let you know when a new version of the waste audit is out, plus the occasional practical IT and business guide. Free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
Frequently asked questions
What does TIM WOODS stand for?
TIM WOODS stands for the eight wastes of lean: Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects and Skills. It is a memory aid for spotting activities that use time or money without adding value for the customer.
What are the 7 wastes of lean?
The seven wastes are Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing and Defects, often remembered as TIMWOOD. They were set out by Taiichi Ohno as part of the Toyota Production System. The eighth, Skills (unused talent), was added later in Western lean writing.
What is the difference between TIMWOOD and TIMWOODS?
TIMWOOD is Ohno’s original seven wastes. TIMWOODS, or TIM WOODS, adds an eighth: Skills, meaning people’s knowledge, abilities and ideas that are not being used.
What is the difference between TIM WOODS and DOWNTIME?
There is no difference in the wastes themselves. DOWNTIME lists the same eight in a different order: Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Non-utilised talent, Transportation, Inventory, Motion and Extra-processing. DOWNTIME is common in Lean Six Sigma courses; TIM WOODS is widely used in the UK.
Who came up with the 7 wastes?
Taiichi Ohno, the Toyota engineer behind the Toyota Production System, described the seven wastes in his book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Japanese edition 1978, English edition 1988).
What is muda in lean?
Muda is Japanese for waste: any activity that consumes resources without creating value for the customer. It is one of the “three Ms” of lean, alongside mura (unevenness in the workload) and muri (overburdening people or equipment).
Which of the 8 wastes is the worst?
Overproduction is traditionally called the worst, because making too much or too early creates the other wastes. In an office, waiting and unused skills are often the most costly in practice, so it is worth measuring rather than assuming.
Do the 8 wastes apply to offices and IT, or only manufacturing?
They apply to any kind of work. In an office they show up as approval queues, unread reports, unused software licences, data typed into several systems and staff whose ideas are never asked for.
How do you carry out a waste walk?
Pick one process, follow a real piece of work through it from start to finish with two or three colleagues, note every waste against a TIM WOODS letter, score and cost each one, fix the top one or two, and walk the same process again 30 days later.
This article is general guidance on improving business processes, not formal lean or Six Sigma certification material. The worked example is illustrative. Updated 3 October 2026.