Whatever the cause, workers have to sit around twiddling their thumbs while waiting for the bottleneck to be cleared. There are many ways to handle this, though some may run up against other waste reduction efforts; one of the more obvious is the need to provide adequate staffing to handle the workload at the bottlenecks, which some managers may target as a source of monetary waste. Otherwise, efforts to push decision-making ability to lower levels, better quality control to ensure the reliability of necessary machinery and systems, better supply control, and employee cross-training to prevent bottlenecking during absences can all serve to limit this form of waste.
The concept of Non-utilized/underutilized talent, while not included in the original Japanese list of the seven wastes, is an integral part of the American concept of DOWNTIME. Rather than being transparent to the system, people themselves have been plugged into the equation, in the sense that poor utilization of existing talents, ideas, abilities, and skill sets is a waste as real as using ten pounds of iron when five will do. This type of waste can be caused by a myriad of things, not least: