Summary: Identifying and eliminating waste is one of the fundamental challenges of Lean Six Sigma. This includes within Lean Six Sigma for Digital Marketing. Finding these wastes as part of your Lean practice is important because wastes in your processes do not add any value to the outputs you provide to your customer. But where should you look for lean waste? In what areas are you most likely to find the best opportunities to improve marketing process performance? Below I will highlight the seven wastes Lean is out to eliminate.

The Seven Wastes of Lean

Lean Six Sigma proposes that there are seven wastes, of which one or more could be present in your processes. The original origins of Lean focus mostly on wastes within manufacturing operations, but as you will see below these seven lean waste opportunities exist in a wide range of industries, and disciplines, including marketing. The seven lean waste opportunities are:

• Transportation

• Inventory

• Motion

• Waiting

• Over-processing

• Overproduction

• Defects

Transportation

Transportation, the first of the seven wastes in Lean Six Sigma, serves to link operations separated by both short and long distances. It becomes a critical operational function as organizations outsource the number of parts and services they deliver, and as they increase the geographic scope of the markets they serve. So what does transportation waste have to do with marketing?

Transportation might be a rare occurrence in marketing, but it does come into play if you house promotional items or tradeshow materials. Moving these materials around, including getting them to customers, involves physical transportation!

The increase in outsourcing and activities, the continued expansion and global commerce, together with the movement and flow of individuals and goods within a facility, suggests that the real challenge in managing transportation costs is to ensure that this activity does not add unnecessary costs to an operational process. What do we mean by unnecessary costs? Many activities that require transportation, regardless of the distance covered, add little customer value. Many of those can be eliminated or significantly reduced through process redesign.

Inventory

Inventory relates to the physical marketing items I referenced in the “Transportation” section above. Deciding how much inventory to hold requires careful consideration. Maintaining too little inventory can be costly as out of stock situations can lead customers to competitors. Maintaining too much inventory can also be costly since inventory represents the idle use of funds. In Lean waste, inventory cost controls of too much and too little inventory are balanced to maintain just the right amount of inventory.

Motion

In traditional Lean Six Sigma, motion relates to how physical items move, for example, around a manufacturing facility. Motion waste in Lean Marketing is all about the motion of information and work. How many different individuals or processes does a piece of work or a project have to touch before it can be released to customers or prospects? Identifying the motion steps in Lean waste can help you spot areas of waste that can be improved through process redesign.

Waiting

Waiting is also wasteful. It becomes important to identify where waiting occurs in a marketing process and what steps need to be taken to eliminate or minimize it. For example, there are lots of areas within marketing where waiting occurs. Perhaps it is a creative design that gets completed but then waits for implementation in a newsletter or blog post. Perhaps it is a paid media specialist waiting for a piece of content from the content marketing team. Areas of waiting should be identified and fixed via process redesign project.

Over-Processing

Have you ever taken an exam only to discover that you had spent too much time studying the wrong topics? If so, then you suffered from over-processing.

Over-processing refers to the extra effort put into a product, component, service, or process that adds little value. In marketing, this waste can exist in a number of different ways. Maybe it is over-planning that brand campaign, or spending too much time working on marketing projects that don’t offer much value. The Lean waste challenge is to find the right amount of processing; no more and no less. I believe the best way to do this is to track each and every project in detail so you can use the findings in future planning efforts.

Overproduction

Overproduction occurs when more is produced than can be justified by actual orders or by a forecast. It comes from the belief that extra inventory can provide a cushion against unforeseen circumstances such as high reject levels or sudden increases in demand instead, the principle of Lean waste requires that production be limited to what is needed in the short run or what is actually ordered by the customer. This exists most prevalent in manufacturing operations.

In marketing, I equate overproduction to lead generation. While the idea of generating a large number of leads might sound appealing, if your company’s sales team can’t handle an overabundance of leads, the extra amount might become waste. Like balancing raw materials and production machines in a manufacturing plant, marketing leads should be balanced with the processes that work those leads, if any exist.

Defects

Minimizing defects is one of the major objectives of a Lean waste process redesign project. Producing no defects in your marketing operations, or achieving near perfection, is very costly. Nonetheless, it seems appropriate to say that within the constraints of reasonable marketing production costs, defects need to be minimized. Finding strategic ways to quality check marketing work as it progresses is key in eliminating defects.

Suggestions on Eliminating the Seven Wastes in Marketing

Luckily in marketing, we have a number of tools that can help us eliminate wastes across our operations. Here is a quick list of things to consider. And if you need help identifying Lean wastes within your marketing operations and finding solutions, drop me a note and let’s work together!

• Consider using marketing automation where you can so you don’t need to recreate materials and eliminate mistakes.

• Have all your processes mapped out in detail and review them regularly.

• Match lead volume to capacity requirements.

• Use artificial intelligence (AI) tools where you can across your marketing operations. These tools can help make automated decisions in some cases, and in others, give you the information you need to make quick, informed decisions.

• Centralize your marketing systems where possible. For example, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud product allows you to combine several marketing functions into one platform, eliminating the need to hop between systems all the time.

Additional Resources for More Information on Lean Waste

If you are interested in learning more about the seven wastes within Lean Six Sigma, I recommend checking out the resources below.

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

• Read about where it all started… The Toyota Production System