Cost-of-waste calculator

What it costs to let it slide.

Calculate the hidden loss in your organisation. Use the calculator to estimate the cost of non-value-adding activities. Amounts are in euros (EUR).

Adjust to your situation

20

Employees in the department/process you want to optimise

€60,000

Include salary, pension, insurance and premises costs

25%

Time spent waiting, searching, correcting errors, duplicated work and other non-value-adding activities. The number is yours, not ours: we have no measured figure for your industry, and an average from another company says nothing about you. To replace the estimate with a measurement, that is what a value stream map is for.

46

Excluding holidays, public holidays and sickness

Your annual loss

Based on the current wasted-time percentage

€300,000

Wasted hours/year

8,510 hours

Loss per employee

€15,000

Illustrative savings potential

Three scenarios with reduced wasted time

Scenario A(20% reduction of wasted time)
€60,000
Scenario B(40% reduction of wasted time)
€120,000
Scenario C(60% reduction of wasted time)
€180,000

The scenarios are illustrative. Actual potential depends on the company’s starting point, process type and effort.

Want to validate your potential?

Book a no-obligation sparring session where we review your situation and give an honest assessment of the improvement opportunities.

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Where does the wasted time come from?

Waiting

For information, approvals, materials or colleagues

Searching

For documents, data, tools or the right person

Correcting errors

Rework, corrections and handling errors from earlier steps

Overproduction

Work that isn’t requested or used

Method: the categories follow Taiichi Ohno’s seven wastes from the Toyota Production System (Japanese edition 1978, English 1988). We put no figure on each category. The distribution depends on process type and starting point, and a number we have not measured at your site is a guess however precisely it is written down.